The American Jewish Committee has called on this country’s major industrial corporations and banks publicly to disavow any compliance with the Arab boycott and to reject any Arab pressures to discriminate against Jews or members of any other minority group. The AJC request asked the companies to emulate the recent action by the Bank of America and the International Business Machines Corporation reasserting their nondiscriminatory policy.
The AJCommittee made its request in letters by its president, Elmer L. Winter, to the heads of this country’s 600 largest industrial companies and 50 largest banks. In his letters, Winter quoted approvingly from a memorandum sent by Bank of America president A. W. Clausen to the Bank’s officers which stated that “it has long been a policy of Bank of America to refuse to entertain questions of race, color, creed, or national origin in its business dealings, It is neither right, nor in the best interest of the bank, to participate in any credit or other business venture where a condition of the venture is discriminatory.”
Winter also quoted the statement made by IBM chairman Frank T. Cary at that company’s recent annual stockholder’s meeting, in which Cary declared that “We do business throughout the world, in the Middle East and in Israel. We have not been blacklisted in any country. We have not received any such pressures. We are not aware of any such pressures, Should we receive any, we would resist them.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
