B’nai B’rith president Philip Klutznick chided religious leaders today for acting the roles of diplomats and statesmen, politicians and military experts. “Who will then lead the people of the world to the only sound basis for peace, the recognition that all men are brothers?” he asks the 16th Congress of the International Association of Liberal Christianity and Religious Freedom meeting here on the University of Chicago campus.
At a session commemorating the tenth year of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mr. Klutznick warned that UN statesmen will not accept the primacy of human rights as a force for world peace “until people everywhere, and especially those in the so-called enlightened nations, make this an order of first urgency,” He urged that clergymen and religious leaders take the lead in a “new crusade that will dwarf the effort of ten years ago.”
The B’nai B’rith leader told 500 Congress delegates representing religious groups from every continent that the “most distressing aspect” of his own service in the UN as a member of the U.S. delegation at the last General Assembly “was to discover how few citizens and non governmental agencies having consultative status with the UN give a high and pressing priority” to enactment of human rights covenants.
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