Israel and Iraq lodged complaints against each other before the UN Human Rights Commission last week. The Israeli representative Zeev Zeltner denounced Baghdad for “the juridicial murder” of nine Iraqi Jews and charged that the Iraqi Jewish community was the victim of persecution and incitement. Mrs. Bedia Afnan, the Iraqi representative, accused Israel of responsibility for the hangings and said Jerusalem was trying to exploit them for propaganda purposes.
Judge Zeltner said Iraqi authorities were spreading anti-Jewish propaganda at home. “As far as the Jews of Iraq are concerned,” he said, “there is no solution or salvation but to emigrate.” Mr. Zeltner also accused Egyptian authorities of arbitrary arrests of Jewish citizens and their imprisonment amid “inhuman cruelties,” He said in Syria, school children were being “taught hatred of the Jew from nursery school.” Mrs. Afnan claimed that the hangings were strictly an internal matter. She said if nine of the victims had not been Jewish “the Israeli Government would have never bothered to mention them.”
(A committee for Iraqi Jews was formed on Friday in Amsterdam, consisting of 16 prominent Dutch personalities, including former Prime Minister William Drees and J.M.L. Cals. university professors, newspaper editors and clergymen. The group’s first act was to send a telegram to the Iraqi Ambassador in Holland demanding that Iraqi Jews be given the right to emigrate.)
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