Top PLO Official Touring the U.S.

A top official of the Palestine Liberation Organization is in the United States for three weeks to promote PLO ideas, on the invitation of groups at four Ivy League universities and the Chicago Council for Foreign Relations.

The official, Shafik AI Hout, is identified as director of the Beirut office of the PLO which maintains its headquarters in that city. He was granted a U.S. visa, cleared by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, on the grounds that under the McGovern Amendment the burden of proof that he will not be a threat to the United States, rests with the U.S. government.

When Hodding Carter, chief spokesman for the State Department and assistant to Vance, was asked about AI Hout’s record on terrorism, Carter said that the PLO official’s record indicates that he apposes terrorism. However, Carter Would not say when or where AI Hout said he opposes terrorism. “I cannot give you details of how we learned that,” Carter said. Al Hout’s record shows that he said on Sept. 2, 1975 in an interview with a Japanese reporter that “Israel is identified with Hitler’s Nazism”; “we have no common grounds with it”; and “war is the only way.” In another interview with NBC on Jan.12,1976, he was quoted as saying “there will be no Israel because I am for a multi-national one-state.”

Groups at Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Princeton, as yet unidentified, invited him. It is understood. that his first appearance will be at Columbia University. He arrived last weekend in New York. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency was told that it would appear that some organizational activity was involved in his speaking arrangements but there were no details about this thus far. He applied for the visa in Beirut.

At the State Department, some sources said that his visit was justified under provisions of free speech in America. However, Hodding Carter said that State Department officials will not be in communication with him under its policy of no communication until the PLO adheres to UN Security Council Resolution 242 and acknowledges Israel’s right to exist.

In another development here, the House of Representatives yesterday voted down 222 to 175 a motion by Rep. William Harsha (R. Ohio) to cut all aid to members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. In addition. $45 million in economic aid for Syria projected by the Administration may be eliminated. Rep. William Broomfield (R.Mich.), the ranking minority member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the House that “Syria played a major role in stimulating obstruction” to the Camp David accords and the Israeli-Egyptian treaty.