The international community was urged at a conference here last week to unequivocally condemn “anti-Semitism without frontiers,” the rapidly spreading phenomenon of Holocaust denial and Jew-baiting in countries with few or no Jews.
“Burgeoning racism and anti-Semitism world-wide” and in various guises was the subject of many of the resolutions adopted at the three-day meeting here of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists World Council, which ended Nov. 5.
The Israel-based association has about 3,000 members worldwide. The meeting in Brussels, seat of the European Community, was attended by 200 delegates from 20 countries and convened under the patronage of the E.C. Executive Commission.
Its sponsor was The European, the English-language weekly founded recently by the late Robert Maxwell, the British publishing tycoon who died mysteriously at sea Nov. 5.
One resolution demanded that all states which have not yet done so enact legislation immediately to prohibit incitement to racial hatred. Those states which have such legislation should make sure it is enforced, the measure said.
The lawyers also called on the international community to repeal the 1975 U.N. General Assembly resolution denigrating Zionism as racism.
The president of the association, Israeli Judge Hadassah Ben-Itto, called the resolution “a libel against the Jewish people, which is being used not only against Israel but against Jews everywhere.”
Ben-Itto, who is retiring from the bench after 31 years to fight anti-Semitism full time, observed, “Although world leaders are on record for the erasure of this libel, the correction of this evil is now cynically being linked to the peace process.”
STATEMENTS ON IRAQ, SYRIAN JEWRY
The meeting also called on the United Nations to release the names of the 140 companies worldwide found to have supplied Iraq with materials and technology for the development of weapons of mass destruction.
International measures were called for to bring Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to justice.
The jurists condemned the “blanket exoneration and rehabilitation” of suspected war criminals by Lithuania as soon as it gained independence from the Soviet Union.
They expressed “alarm” that passage of time combined with the inaction of governments “might yet provide Nazi war criminals with immunity from prosecution.”
The “continuing deprivation of rights of Syrian Jews” was another subject raised at the meeting, chiefly by Canadian Irwin Cotler, a professor of law at McGill University.
Cotler, who serves as counsel to the association, denounced “the acts of reprisal” against Syrian Jews, especially those attempting to exercise their right to leave the country.
Cotler observed that Syrian law granted that right and that Syria is a party to several international undertakings on the subject.
But Syrian Jews, according to Cotler, are an “isolated community which has been taken hostage by its authorities.”
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.
