U.S. Slams Arab’s Contention That Terrorists Are George Washington’s Heirs

The Sixth (Legal) Committee’s discussion of international terrorism was enlivened this afternoon when United States representative W. Tapley Bennett ridiculed last Thursday’s assertion by an Arab delegate that George Washington was just as “radical” as terrorists engaged today in “the struggle for freedom and self-determination.”

Washington, said Bennett, departing from his prepared text, “did not go up to Canada and throw bombs at stagecoaches.” And, he added, “when he crossed the Delaware he did not hijack the boat.”

Bennett’s remarks were directed at Jamil M. Baroody, chief delegate of Saudi Arabia, who sat motionless in the seat absented by the representative of Sierra Leone. Continuing his rejection of the remarks of “my friend and fellow rebel Mr. Baroody,” Bennett said that while the Arab was free to throw tea into Jidda harbor, he was not free to throw bombs onto Fifth Avenue here.

U.S. NOT OPPOSED TO SELF-DETERMINATION

Bennett also rejected Baroody’s charge last week that the stringent anti-terrorist proposals of the U.S. would “suppress” anti-colonialism. “The U.S.,” Bennett said, “knows first-hand the strivings of peoples for self-determination. We would not be a party to any action that would adversely affect that right.”

The U.S. plan, he noted, was “narrowly drawn” to deal “only with the most serious criminal threats,” and only those committed or effective “outside the territory of a State of which the alleged offender is a national.” In an allusion to another Baroody position–that terrorism cannot be eradicated until all wars are–Bennett declared: “We cannot refuse to do anything simply because we cannot do everything….”

CHARGE U.S. TOOL OF ‘JEWISH WORLD NATION’

Meanwhile, Issa Nakhleh, the representative of the “Palestine Arab Delegation” to the General Assembly, unleashed an acrimonious attack against the United States, charging that the U.S. was being used by “the Jewish world nation” as a tool in “the Jewish wars of aggression and expansion.” The Palestinians and all the Arabs regarded the U.S. administration and Congress as “partners and accomplices of the Jewish war criminals,” Nakhleh declared.

He asserted that Resolution 242 was the product of “dishonest diplomacy and manipulation” by the Big Four, and “a reward to the Jewish war criminals,” for their aggression and a green light for more conquests. He further charged that the U.S. provides “the Jewish colonial regime in Palestine” with millions of dollars a year in the form of government grants or through various Jewish appeals, which were “fraudulently” collecting tax-free, tax-deductible funds in the United States.