The Soviet newspapers, including Izvestia, the official organ of the Soviet Government, today carry a Tass report from Tel Aviv comparing the trial there of the Communist newspaper Kol Haam to the recent trial in New York of the eleven leaders of the Communist Party of the United States.
The trial against the Israel Communist newspaper, charged with libeling Israel Premier David Ben Gurion, opened in Tel Aviv on Monday but was postponed because of the transfer of the Ministry of Justice from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Reporting that Kol Haam is charged with insulting the head of the government, the Tass correspondent says that “local journalistic circles” consider that “the Ben Gurion government, in its persecution of individual Communists, has gone over to a red hunt of the Communist Party as a whole and against all progressives in Israel.”
“The government of Israel,” the correspondent says, “follows the path of the American reactionaries who staged the notorious trial of the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States.” The presiding Tel Aviv judge, A. Raohardt, who is “distinguished for his reactionary views, intends to play the role of American Judge Harold Medina,” the dispatch added.
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