Bush Accuses U.s., European Governments of Hypocrisy in Reacting to Bombing of Paris Synagogue

Republican Vice Presidential candidate George Bush accused “many Western democratic governments,” including “the government of the United States,” of “sheer hypocrisy” in their reactions to the bombing of a Paris synagogue on Oct. 3.

Bush, addressing some 500 delegates at the closing session of the 82nd convention of the Zionist Organization of America here last night, declared that “while the violence in Paris has been condemned by France and other Western nations, it cannot be overlooked that the governments of many of those nations have been less than forthright in condemning the threat posed by terrorists to the people of Israel. They have just not done it,” he said.

Bush, a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was the last of the three major Vice Presidential candidates to address the ZOA convention over the weekend.

CITES TWO-FACED POLICY

According to Bush, “There is a link between the virulence of hatred demonstrated on the Rue Copernic (in Paris) and the terrorism that threatens Israel, and it is sheer hypocrisy to condemn anti-Jewish terror in France on the one hand while at the same time giving moral comfort in the United Nations to the Palestine Liberation Organization.”

“Nevertheless,” Bush charged, “many Western democratic governments have practiced that sort of hypocrisy in recent years — staunch allies of the U.S. — including, I regret to say, the government of the U.S.”

Bush said he was “appalled in recent times over the equivocal, indeed the two-faced policy of the Carter Administration and its UN representative in dealing with the status of the PLO.” He said that “the PLO — and let there be no doubt about this — is nothing more than an international Ku Klux Klan” and “it should be branded as such by this Administration, regardless of the views held by President Carter’s former UN Ambassador and current campaign surrogate, Andrew Young.”

EVRON STRIKES A BALANCE

Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Ephraim Evron, who preceded Bush on the speakers’ platform, struck a balance between Democratic and Republican administrations in their positions toward Israel. He recalled U.S. “involvement” in the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and spoke of the “bipartisan support” since Israel’s inception and before, “the friendly act by the American people, initiated and sustained by the leadership of both parties.”

Evron credited former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with having “started the way to peace” in January, 1974 when the first disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel were reached and the interim agreements that followed. “It was that beginning that led to Camp David and beyond,” Evron said.

Ivan Novick was reelected president of the ZOA.