Senator Kenneth Keating, New York Republican, sharply criticized the Washington Administration’s “newly spruced-up program of aid to Nasser” as “a dangerous precedent, ” in an address here last night before the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education.
Calling attention to the fact that he has asked the State Department to explain the new policies of aid to Egypt, he declared that the answers he received from the State Department are “astonishing in their shortsightedness and in their tendency to accept at face value whatever the Arabs chose to say.” The State Department, he charged, has given “no hint of the fact that Israel has replaced Palestine in the Middle East, ” and accepted the “Arab protestations that their military posture vis-a-vis Israel is defensive.”
“I have tried to discover,” he said, “what guarantees we have demanded to make sure that none of our increased aid to Nasser, which may amount to $180,000,000 this year, is used for increased armaments, anti-Western propaganda or economic warfare. Apparently there has been none.”
He advocated passage of an amendment to the U.S. Foreign Aid Bill “to require that we establish priorities in our foreign aid program, and that we do insist on guarantees that United States aid will not be used, directly or indirectly, to step up military spending or hate mongering propaganda.”
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