The American Jewish Congress reported today that anti-Semitic groups had held 23 international meetings since 1950, but added a warning against giving the world anti-Semitic movement “a scope and importance it totally lacks.”
The organization said that danger posed by such groups was “remote rather than immediate” and held that the situation did not justify “any present departure from our traditional concern with the freedoms of speech and expression. ” The. survey indicated, the Congress said, that there were currently 13 international anti-Semitic groups plus local organizations in Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Britain, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
The report was prepared by the group’s Commission On International Affairs and was released at a meeting of its Governing Council. The report said it was “questionable” whether there was more to the international anti-Semitic movement than “a collection of fanatics, crackpots, true believers and assorted extremists who are thoroughly discredited and completely without power, even in those countries in which they claim to be most effective .”
The report asserted there was no “hard evidence” of a coordinated, well-established or effective international conspiracy for the promotion of anti-Semitism or neo-Fascism. It added that the existing local and international anti-Semitic groups have been “a continuing irritant in the public life of Europe and the United States throughout the entire postwar period” but that there was nothing “in the recent manifestations of anti-Semitism to support the notion that either their overall membership or their potential threat has become significantly enlarged.”
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.
