The Reagan Administration is committed to “tough-minded diplomacy in defense of Israel and has resolved to bring an end to the obsessive scapegoating of Israel in the United Nations,”Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations this week. According to persons attending the meeting, the U.S. envoy to the UN, in her first appearance before the Conference, said she was “determined to resist challenges to Israel’s rightful place among the family of nations.”
The new U.S. position, she said, was now being supported by African countries that formerly followed the line of the Arab-Soviet bloc. Kirkpatrick noted, as an example, that recent Arab efforts to challenge Israel’s recent presence at the World Health Organization conference in Geneva had come to naught and she praised the U.S. delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, Michael Novak, for his “refusal to remain silent in the face of obscene anti-Semitism” expressed at the Commission.
“As long as I am at the United Nations, Israel will never face her enemies alone,” Kirkpatrick said to rousing applause from some 150 representatives of Presidents Conference member organizations.
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