The welcome given at the Vatican last week to an official of the Palestine Liberation Organization was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the Israel Consulate General.
Abraham Foxman, associate national director of the ADL, said the meeting between Cardinal Agostine Casaroli, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, and Farouk Kaddoumi, head of the PLO’s political department, was “encouragement” to the PLO terrorists. “Not only is such a meeting ill-considered but it comes at a most inauspicious time,” Foxman
said, “a time when international terrorists, spearheaded by the PLO, is on the rise in Latin Ameria and elsewhere, when nuns and a Roman Catholic bishop are senselessly murdered and voices are raised in alarm around the world.”
The ADL, which is sending a protest to the Vatican, stressed that “For the Vatican Secretary of State to officially receive a PLO representative is to give these murderers and blackmailers a form of legitimacy and recognition that encourages more barbarism, more blackmail, more hostage-taking–so that none of us, wherever we may reside, can feel safe in our homes, our embassies, offices or in planes.”
The Consulate General here issued a statement on behalf of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in which it declared that Israel was “astonished” to learn that the Vatican had “received a representative of the terrorist organization that claims credit for the brutal murder of innocent civilians, and has made the destruction of the Jewish State its central objective. This organizations, the PLO, plays a central role in the international terrorist community.”
The Israeli statement noted with “regret” that the Vatican meeting “cannot contribute to peace efforts but, on the contrary, can only cause damage to these efforts.”
In Jerusalem where the Foreign Ministry issued a similar statement, Ministry sources expressed “amazement” that Greek Catholic Archbishop Hilarion Capucci, freed at Vatican urging from an Israeli prison where he had been serving a sentence for gun-running for Arab terrorists, had been active in the airport reception for Kaddoumi when he arrived in Rome. After being freed from prison Capucci was sent to Latin America but then returned to Rome where he has campaigned for the PLO even though he was officially barred from such activity by the Vatican.
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.
