Jdl Denounces Jewish Anti-war Groups As More Dangerous to Israel Than Arabs

The Jewish Defense League, one of the few American Jewish groups that vigorously supports United States involvement in the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, issued today a free-wheeling attack on American Jewish organizations and individuals opposed to the war. It accused them of doing more to destroy the State of Israel “than all the Arab armies.” Specific targets of a JDL statement issued at a press conference were the Radical Jewish Union, the American Jewish Congress and Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the congregational body of Reform Judaism. The JDL statement also reviled “all the individual Jews who have made peace an absolute sacred cow.”

According to the JDL, American withdrawal from Indo-China without victory “could guarantee the destruction of the State of Israel.” The group contended that escalation of Soviet activity in the Mideast “has been in direct proportion to the apparent weakness of the U.S. in S.E. Asia. Encouraged by the success of the peace movement in the U.S. in paralyzing U.S. foreign policy, the Soviets are becoming convinced that this movement will be a permanent bar to U.S. strength in the Middle East,” the JDL claimed. Emphasizing that it was for the survival of world freedom and the continued existence of Israel, the JDL statement observed that the enemy the U.S. fights in Southeast Asia is the “same enemy that has declared over and over again its support of Arab destruction of the State of Israel. The Black Panthers whom the same people support in the U.S., support the Arabs in their attempt to eliminate the Jewish people in the Jewish state. There is something unbelievably blind and abnormal about people who join in the plot for their own destruction.”