Two Congressmen Score Malik for Anti-semitic Attack on Israel

Congressmen Benjamin S. Rosenthal and Edward I. Koch denounced the Soviet attack on Israel, Zionism and Jews at the United Nations Security Council meeting last Saturday, and scored US Ambassador George Bush for not responding to Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik’s speech. The Congressmen, both New York Democrats, described Malik’s statement as “slanderous” and an attempt “to stir the bestial prejudices that rise so quickly when sparked.” In a joint statement, they also said that they were “distressed because not one delegate other than Israel’s rose to challenge or denounce Malik’s anti-Semitic remarks and our own delegate, George Bush, sat silently by. Once again the US stood mute while the Jewish people were being slandered,” the Congressmen said.

During his diatribe against Israel, Malik warned Israeli Ambassador Yosef Tekoah not to “stick your long nose into our Soviet garden. History shows that those who have stuck their noses into our garden have usually lost them.” Continuing his attack, which surprised many of the Security Council members including some of the die-hard opponents of Israel, Malik asserted that Zionism and fascism “both are racist ideologies…The fascists advocated the superiority of the Aryan race (and the Zionist) racist theory is the same. The fascists advocated hatred toward all peoples and the Zionists do the same. The chosen people; is this not racism?”

Koch and Rosenthal said that it was necessary to dwell on Ambassador Malik’s contention that Israel was using “Hitlerite tactics.” What most incensed them, the two Jewish Congressmen declared, was Malik’s equating of “Zionism” with “fascism.” They said, “Surely, it will shock the conscience of decent people everywhere to have Zionism, expressing the love that Jews have had for their ancestoral homeland from time immemorial, equated with fascism. Here we are, proud members of the US Congress devoted to the United States and also proud to be referred to as Zionist.” They added that “the Soviet Union does in fact define Zionism as a crime.”

Even in the Soviet Union, they noted, it is not acceptable to “openly encourage anti-Semitism, and so an acceptable codeword, Zionism, has been found, making it respectable for Soviet citizens to revile Jews in the Soviet Union–only they are reviled not as Jews but as Zionists.” They said that Malik “would not dare” make “similar references and use his crude, obscene language to the Japanese delegation or to any of the Christian delegates sitting at that table.” What brought him “to this state so as to make him lose even an outward show of decency” they said, was that “on past occasions the only delegate in the UN willing to stand up to the Soviet Union and unmask Mr. Malik’s pretense and expose his savagery, has been the delegate from Israel.”