Efforts to bring aid to the threatened Jewish community in Iraq and to protect two Iraqi Jews accused of spying for Israel along with nine Christians and a Moslem from hanging, were launched this weekend by national American Jewish organizations.
In a message to President Nixon, UN Secretary-General U Thant, Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Ambassador Charles W. Yost, the American Jewish Congress called for “vigorous denunciation” of the trumped-up charges and immediate action. “At the very least,” the agency said, “the United Nations Human Rights Commission, presumably mandated to investigate the treatment of minorities in the Middle East and elsewhere, must be called upon to direct its attention to this newest expression of barbarism in Iraq. Under these emergent conditions, there can be no justification for the UN to continue studiously to turn away from inquiry into the treatment of Jews in Arab countries.”
The B’nai B’rith asked Secretary of State Rogers for “prompt action” through the United Nations, to prevent the threatened executions. Dr. William A. Wexler, its international president, said Iraq’s rapacity tested “the conscience and capacity for moral outrage of free peoples everywhere.”
In Los Angeles, the annual convention of the Jewish War Veterans of the United States called for mobilization of world public opinion in behalf of Iraqi Jews.
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.
