Israel’s representative to the United Nations lashed back at Iraq today for alleging that Israel was more reprehensible than the white racist regime governing Rhodesia. In a letter to Max Jakobson of Finland, President of the Security Council, Ambassador Yosef Tekoah, denounced Iraq as a country responsible for “imprisonment, torture and barbaric hangings of innocent Jews in Baghdad’s squares” that dared to interject itself into discussions of the rights of man and the freedom of nations. Mr. Tekoah’s statement was aimed at a March 16 statement and submitted to Mr. Jakobson April 3 by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, circulated in the Security Council in connection with the debate on Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). The Iraqi statement said that “although the rights of the people of Zimbabwe have been flagrantly violated by the white European minority, the people of Zimbabwe are still in their country and homeland, while Israel has been able, with the assistance and collusion of western colonialism, to expel the Palestinian people, the legal inhabitants of the country, from their ancestral homeland.”
Mr. Tekoah’s letter stated, “It is obvious that a comparison between the restoration by the Jewish people of their sovereignty in Israel after a struggle of 2000 years to liquidate the consequences of the foreign conquests of their land, and the illegal racist regime in Southern Rhodesia is an insidious distortion. The white inhabitants of Zimbabwe have no other connection with the land except colonialist settlement…In Israel every hill and valley are witness to the irrevocable bonds between the people and the land of Israel.”
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