Deputy Premier Yigal Allon expressed bitter indignation last night over the harassment of the Israeli team that participated in the World University Games in Moscow last week. Welcoming the sportsmen home, Allon said the hostility shown the Israeli athletes and the brutal treatment of Russian Jews who came to root for them amounted to abuses unfit for a nation that considers itself cultured. Allon’s remarks were the first official reaction by an Israeli leader to the events in Moscow that aroused the ire of Jews all over the world.
The Deputy Premier who is also Israel’s Minister of Education and Culture said there was “nothing more cynical” on the part of the Russians than their invitation to El Fatah chief Yassir Arafat to attend the games as a guest of honor of the Soviet government. “As commander of El Fatah, Arafat is also commander of the Black September which was responsible for the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich,” Allon said.
Adin Talbar, who headed the Israeli delegation to the games in Moscow reported today that KGB (Russian secret police) agents attacked Jews who came to the University Games village to say goodbye to the Israeli athletes as they left yesterday by bus for the airport. He said the KGB men grabbed the Jews, beat them up and dragged them away. “We felt very badly that these Jews should suffer for us. All the way home we thought of them. Their only crime was that they wanted to give us some presents.” Talbar said.
(The Soviet Embassy in Washington charged today that the stories about the harassment of the Israeli athletes were “fabricated” by “Zionists.” who have launched a “slander campaign, trying to compromise the holding of the Universiade” in the Soviet Union. The Embassy charge was based on an article in Novosti Press, the official Soviet news agency outside the USSR.)
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.
