American Jewish Committee Attacks Arab Anti-jewish Propaganda in U.S.

Attacks against American Jews by Arab propagandists “can only contribute to disunity among Americans and confuse the issue in the Middle East,” the American Jewish Committee warned today.

Declaring that “there is no doubt that Arab propagandists are seeking, by their use of anti-Semitic propaganda, to weaken the status of Jews in America,” the AJC reported that allied with the Arab propagandists are many of America’s right-wing propagandists who “in happy accord with any anti-Semitic campaign, are publicizing the Arab view. The result of such activity is “obstructing the development of a sound American policy” for the Middle East, the report said.

“The American Jewish committee is a non-Zionist organization, but it deeply resents any implication that Zionists or other Jews in the United States are disloyal to their country,” the AJC statement emphasized, It named Arab diplomats as the worst offenders These include Mohammed Fadhel el-Jamali, chairman of the Iraq delegation to the UN General Assembly; Farid Zeineddine, Syrian Ambassador to the United States; and Mohammed Habib, press attache at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington. Arab diplomats the AJC points out, “for years have been using the forum of the United Nations for similar attacks on American Jews, accusing them of ‘dual loyalty’, ‘dual nationality’, ‘dual allegiance.”‘

The AJC report states that among the anti-Semites who have jumped on the Arab band wagon are Gerald L. K. Smith and Conde McGinley, in addition to such organizations “as the openly Hitlerite National Renaissance Party.” Most of the Arab propaganda seems to emanate from Cairo, the AJC says, citing the Egyptian-inspired pamphlet, “Jewish Atrocities in the Holy Land.” A second pamphlet, “The Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt,” obviously written in Cairo, is being distributed by Smith, McGinley and other extreme right-wingers whose hatred for America’s Jews “has inspired their devotion to the Arab cause.”

The AJC calls attention to the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel arguments used by America’s anti-Semites who continuously equate Communism with Zionism, insisting that Zionism and Communism both seek “world supremacy.” “The anti-Semites have eagerly picked up and amplified these arguments, though how they will find evidence of Zionist-Communist rapport in the shipment of Czech arm to Egypt remains to be seen,” the AJC points out. It deplores the adoption “by more respectable elements of American public opinion,” such as the American Friends of the Middle East, of the false charge by America’s anti-Semites and Arab propagandists that the so-called “Jewish vote” exerts an influence on American foreign policy in the Middle East.