Labor Leaders Meet with Moynihan; Blast UN Draft Denounce Amin

A delegation of 23 national labor leaders met yesterday for 40 minutes with Daniel Moynihan, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, to denounce the adoption of the anti-Zionist draft resolution by the UN Third Committee and Uganda’s President Idi Amin. The delegation, headed by Harry Van Arsdale, president of the New York City Central Labor Council AFL-CIO, said that Oct. 17, the day the anti-Zionist draft was adopted, “will live in history a day of infamy.”

Van Arsdale, in a statement delivered on behalf of the 23 labor leaders, excoriated the UN as “the sinkhole” with “113 dictatorships and totalitarian regimes (that) far outnumber the two dozen remaining democracies.” Continuing, he declared:

“How dare the majority in the UN condemn Zionism as racism when they know that in Israel every resident, of every race, color and creed has equal rights as a citizen of the state? Israel has almost a half-million Arab citizens, full participants in the building of their new society. What Arab state accords its minorities such status, such participation in national life? Isn’t it hypocrisy when Africans surrender to Arab oil blackmail and kiss the feet of those who sold them into slavery? It wasn’t the Americans or the Jews who started the African slave trade; it was those same Arab potentates.”

Referring to Amin’s remarks in the General Assembly calling for the extermination of Israel us a state, Van Arsdale stated: “Idi Amin dared to stand before the General Assembly in his be-medaled uniform, dripping with the blood of fifty thousand of his innocent countrymen whom he murdered and the suffering of the thousands whom he expelled penniless from Uganda. He dared to speak of exterminating Israel. He attacked millions of Black Americans for their ‘cowardice’ in fighting for their civil rights without the blood-shed with which he is too familiar. And he used the old slur. ‘American imperialism.’ besmirching the ground on which he stood.”

The trade union official praised the U.S. delegation to the UN for taking a vigorous stand against Amin and the anti-Zionist draft resolution, and lauded Moynihan for embracing Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog after the vote on the draft was taken.

Moynihan assured the labor leaders, during the meeting at the U.S. Mission to the UN, that if the draft is approved by the General Assembly the U.S. will consider it as only a recommendation and will not hood it. He said the best that can be hoped for is that the vote for the draft can be postponed.