President Valery Giscard d’Esming of France expressed “revulsion” over the have of anti-Semitic violence in his country the French leader’s sentiments were conveyed to Israel’s Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who is presently in Luxembourg heading on Israeli delegation in trade talks with European Economic Community (EEC). representatives.
Israeli officials traveling with Shamir reported that Giscard’s message was relayed to him by Foreign Minister Gaston Thorn of Luxembourg who is chairman of the EEC’s Council of Ministers, Thorn met with Giscard in Paris Monday and with Shamir in Luxembourg yesterday.
At his meeting with the EEC officials yesterday, Shamir said the Palestine Liberation Organization was providing leftwing and rightwing terrorist groups in Europe with organizational, financial and training assistance and there fore the PLO bore responsibility for the bombing of a Paris synagogue last Friday.
WZO, WJC URGE ACTION AGAINST ANTI-SEMITISM
The World Zionist Organization Executive issued a statement here yesterday declaring that “the government of France must see itself responsible for punishing those responsible and for preventing any further neo-Nazi activities.” The statement, expressing solidarity with French Jews, denounced the rash of anti-Semitic incidents in France and claimed that the United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism “opened the way” for new anti-Semitic outbreaks.
In New York, Edgar Bronfman, acting president of the World Jewish Congress, issued a statement declaring that the WJC “shares the sense of shock and outrage felt by the Jewish community of France, by all decent Frenchmen and by Jewish communities throughout the world at the recent anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish institutions in Paris, culminating in the murderous bombing of the Rue Copernic Synagogue on October 3.”
The statement extended “deepest sympathy to the families of those who were killed by the bomb blast and our sincere wishes for a full recovery to those who were injured.” It noted: “We have long called for attention at international forums and at the UN to the danger of neo-Nazi racist propaganda and other forms of political extremism, whose purpose is to use the weapon of terror to incite racial and religious hatred and discrimination.”
(Bronfman welcomed the resolution adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Oct. I on the need to combat resurgent fascist propaganda and its racist aspects. The resolution urges governments and parliaments of member states to adopt; where it does not already exist, legislation directed against actions inspired by racism and xenophobia. The WJC, Bronfman added, “sincerely hopes that all governments which have not already taken effective measures against those groups and movements which sow terror and murder in an effort to undermine the fabric of democracy — particularly governments of countries where memories of the nightmare years of the Holocaust must surely persist — to act immediately in accordance with the Parliamentary Assembly’s resolution.”)
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.
