Rep. Ogden Reid (D.N.Y.) declared here today that those “hurrying to condemn” Israel for its interception Friday of a Lebanese commercial airliner were mostly those who had “evaded support for international conventions” urged by Israel to prevent “air piracy.”
The former U.S. Ambassador to Israel also told a press conference that while the Israeli interception had violated Lebanese air space, it had been the result “of this failure to achieve a universal action against air piracy.”
Reid said acts of piracy by Arab terrorists and the murder of innocent people at the Munich Olympics, Lod Airport and other places could not be treated in terms of policy but were simply “acts of barbarism and violation of all standards of international law and the United Nations Charter.”
PREDICTS PASSAGE OF JACKSON AMENDMENT
Reid also asserted that the United States would “never” sacrifice human freedom and the elementary right to emigrate for “convenience” in foreign policy, and that the Congress would approve before the end of 1973 amendments to the East-West Trade Act linking granting of special trade concessions to the Soviet Union with a Soviet agreement to end harassments and restrictions on Russian Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel.
Reid said he hoped that Soviet leaders would understand that the amendments in the Senate and House embodied a question of the most serious character and that the United States must exert maximum pressure on the Soviet Union. He said that the U.S. must explain to the USSR that as long as Jews are deprived of the right to emigrate to Israel, the USSR could not expect to have the status of a favored nation in commercial relations with the U.S.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
