Iraq has handed a formal diplomatic note to the Department of State, protesting a recent address by Senator John F. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, before the Zionist Organization of America.
The Iraqi Embassy made known that it has protested to the Department here and that the Iraqi Foreign Ministry handed a note to the American Embassy in Baghdad. According to an Iraqi news agency report today the protest was lodged because the Kennedy speech “contained blatant praise of world Zionism and Jewry. “
The note said that “it is truly painful that electioneering propaganda should be exploited for the purpose of harming the Arabs and their legal rights and for supporting the usurping group which continues committing crimes against the rights of the peaceful Palestinian Arabs–a group responsible for displacing one million Palestinian Arab refugees.”
The Iraqi Foreign Ministry note stated that the Kennedy speech affected American-Arab relations and that this stand was not in the interest of relations between Iraq and the United States.
The Iraqi Government asked the State Department to intercede with “American quarters concerned with a view to clarifying the ill effects caused by Kennedy’s speech, ” Senator Kennedy is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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.
