Two Senators Ask Administration to Probe Arab Efforts to Extend Anti-israel Boycott in the U.S.

Attempts by Arab interests to extend their anti-Israel boycott to banking firms with Jewish members were denounced by two leading U.S. Senators who asked the Ford Administration to make a prompt investigation of the development. Sen, Jacob K. Javits (R.NY) and Sen. Harrison A. Williams Jr. (D.NJ) made the request in a letter to Treasury Secretary William A. Simon. The Senators asked for a probe to determine whether the boycott had caused religious discrimination against “Jewish or any other Americans” and whether any U.S. laws had been violated.

Disclosure of the extension of the Arab boycott to some Jewish banking houses was made initially in Britain and France and later last week in the United States. The Senators wrote last Friday that they were gravely concerned about reports of efforts “to discriminate against banking firms with Jewish members from participation in international financial transactions.”

They said the effort “seems to be spreading toward the United States as evidenced by the reported withdrawal of the Kuwait Investment Co. from two transactions in which it would have been an underwriter together with Lazard Freres and Co.,” a Jewish-owned firm in Paris. “We believe that the spread of this unconscionable practice so opposed to American principles and law should be stopped in the United States.”

SEEK BAR TO RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION

They praised the brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith, which said last week it planned to go ahead with two international sales of securities despite the decision of the Kuwaiti firm to withdraw. They said it was clearly intolerable to permit Arab, or any other, investors “to attempt to extend such religious discrimination to the United States.” Javits and Williams also asked Simon to “promulgate, where possible, such regulations as may be necessary to prevent the occurrence of any such religious discrimination” and to propose new legislation “if needed to prevent such discrimination.”

The Senators said, in their letter, they felt the United States was ready “to welcome foreign investment, including Arab investment,” if it conformed to “the standards of our society and interest but Arab oil money should not be permitted to enter our country on a basis contrary to our morality and Constitution.”