Njcrac Calls Emergency Meeting on Anti-israel Times Advertisement

The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, composed of nine lay and rabbinical Jewish organizations and 92 community affiliates, has scheduled an emergency meeting tomorrow morning to discuss possible action in response to a full-page advertisement in today’s New York Times condemning President Nixon for “blind support” of Israel. One NJCRAC official said such prompt meetings were not unusual, but one participant described it as an “emergency meeting” to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The ad, headed “A Letter to the President,” was taken by Norman F. Dacey of Southbury, Conn., who described himself as chairman of Volunteers for Nixon in 1968, director of psychological warfare operations for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in World War II, a broadcast commentator and “a reasonably patriotic American.” Advising Nixon that he was now “ashamed of the position of my country in the Middle East,” Dacey wrote of Israel’s “pure aggression” and “ruthless” expulsion of Palestinians, its “brutal physical torture of Arab prisoners in Israel,” its “strictest censorship” of foreign reporters, its “gross violations” of the Geneva Conventions and its “sweet-talking” of the United States into granting its “every wish” militarily. “The knowledge that my country’s moral and material support of this politico-military monster is all that keeps it going is a matter of shame and embarrassment to me, Mr. President,” he wrote.

Dacey has often written and spoken against Israel, as in the Wall Street Journal of April 6, 1971, in which he scored its “deliberate defiance” of the United Nations in having “seized and annexed the internationalized Holy City of Jerusalem.” In a letter in the Bridgeport (Conn.) Post last week, he condemned Israel for “war crimes” and for “torturing” Arabs, “destroying” their homes and “deporting them.” He wrote then that he was not anti-Semitic, but that the “second greatest crime”–after Hitler’s attempted genocide–has been “Zionism’s unspeakable treatment of the Palestinian people, whose land they invaded.”

SAYS ISRAEL BROUGHT USSR INTO MIDDLE EAST

Dacey’s Mideast views have been quoted favorably by Alfred M. Lilienthal, the anti-Zionist Jewish editor of Middle East Perspective, who calls him “the well-known publicist.” Dacey is best known, however, as the author of the best-selling “How to Avoid Probate,” which angered many lawyers. The New York Bar Association sued to prevent distribution of the book, calling it misleading, but lost, and Dacey reaped “a million dollars’ worth of publicity,” according to Dorothy Beck, assistant director of the United Jewish Council of Bridgeport. Calling Dacey “a true hater” and “not an amateur,” she told the JTA that tomorrow’s NJCRAC meeting was important because “they have to know he took on the Bar Association and beat the heck out of them.”

Dacey declared he was “convinced that if you (Nixon) continue your present foreign policy of blind support for Israel which in the UN has isolated us from the rest of the world community, there won’t be any United States, economically sound or otherwise.” This, he said, was because “with consummate skill and cunning, the Israeli government which we have imposed upon the peoples of the Middle East is turning its conflict with the Arabs into a confrontation between our country and Russia,” and “If they cannot have their own way, they are quite prepared to spark an Armageddon which will destroy us all.” It is Israel, Dacey charged, “which has brought a Communist presence into the area.”

The ad also denounced the US government for “spending an additional $85 million it does not have to finance the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel” while this country’s “huge deficit” hangs “like an albatross around its neck.” American Zionists’ “bitter opposition” to the bill, since withdrawn, to provide 30,000 American visas for Soviet Jews “unmasks the theatrical hand-wringing over the alleged persecution of Jews in Russia, revealing it as simply a political scheme to build the population of Israel.” Dacey alleged. Adding criticism of “discriminatory” internal Israeli practices, he concluded that the “intolerable” US approach to the Mideast made it necessary for him to “work vigorously” to defeat the President he had helped elect.