The United States and Israel on one side, and the Soviet Union on the other, clashed here today over a proposal by Israel at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that the world be called upon “to combat prejudices such as anti-Semitism.”
The conflict developed at the morning session of the Commission during the debate of a draft United Nations Convention on the elimination of all forms of religious intolerance a proposal which the USSR has been fighting here for six years through many parliamentary and procedural maneuvers.
Israel’s representative on the Commission, Associate Israeli Supreme Court Justice Haim H. Cohn, submitted an amendment to one proposed article in the draft Convention, mentioning anti-Semitism specifically as a prejudice to combat. Evgeny Nasinovsky, the Soviet delegate to the Commission, presented an alternative amendment that would eliminate the word “anti-Semitism” and call, instead for “uniting the efforts of all persons and organizations, regardless of religion, in the interests of peace among peoples and states.”
Morris B. Abram, the United States delegate to the Commission, backed the Israeli amendment. Referring to anti-Semitism as “the most pervasive and persistent form of the evil we are hoping to bring under international control, ” he asked the Commission: “Can it possibly do any harm for us to mention anti-Semitism in this Convention?”
“My delegation believes,” Mr. Abram told the Commission, “that a specific reference to anti-Semitism in this Convention is not only proper but needed for many reasons. Anti-Semitism is an illustration of religious intolerance and discrimination in its most persistent and pervasive form.
“Unchecked anti-Semitism, ” continued Mr. Abram, “played a leading role in the establishment of the criminal Nazi state which, in our own time, after devouring its Jewish population, proceeded to destroy the religious and political freedoms of other German citizens and then to the systematic genocide of several great peoples and the conquest of Europe. Anti-Semitism has played a critical role in the preparation of societies for the destruction of religious and political freedoms of everybody.”
U.S. DELEGATE BACKS ISRAEL’S PROPOSAL WITH FORCEFUL ARGUMENTS
Pointing out that some delegations in the last U.N. General Assembly noted that they believed a specific reference to anti-Semitism belonged in the Convention dealing with religious intolerance, and not in connection with racial discrimination, Mr. Abram said: “In the area of religious intolerance and discrimination, anti-Semitism is the classic case, as apartheid is in the area of racial discrimination.”
“The anti-Semite, ” Mr. Abram continued, “advances any argument which will serve his ends, but the Jew is the only Semitic person whom he ever attacks, and his grounds will shift to exploit any advantage or when a previous argument has failed. Moreover, the same Jew may be described by the anti-Semite as a Wall Street capitalist and as a Communist; as a religious fanatic and an anti-religious devil; as an aggressive fighter and as a despicable coward.”
Taking issue with the Soviet argument that peoples other than Jews are also Semites, and that therefore, it would be confusing to use the term in an international convention, the U.S. delegate urged the members of the Human Rights Commission to recognize this argument as “a quibble. ” The Soviet Government, he pointed out, had no problem about the meaning of the word anti-Semitism when, in July 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars declared that “the anti-Semitic movements and pogroms against the Jews are fatal to the interests of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution.”
“Both the World Council of Churches and Vatican Council II of the Catholic Church have singled out anti-Semitism for specific condemnation,” he said. “The former, in November-December 1961, in a resolution on anti-Semitism urged its member churches ‘to do all in their power to resist every form of anti-Semitism.’ Pope Paul VI, on October 28, 1965, at the Vatican Council, promulgated the Declaration on the Relations of the Church to Non-Christian Religions which, as we have noted, specifically decried anti-Semitism and used that word.”
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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.
