Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

Defamation of Zionism: The new anti-Semitism by Simon Griver World Zionist Press Service When the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 in November 1975 which equated Zionism with racism, few people fully grasped that a momentous milestone in Jewish history was being laid in place. On that day a decade ago, a new and notorious formula was legitimated that would threaten the existence ot Israel, the Jewish people and even the demo cratic values of the West. On that fateful day a new slander was promulgated by which to persecute the Jewish people. Historically the Jewish people had been harassed and massacred for its tenacious refusal to convert to Christianity. Then anti-Judaism was superceded by anti-Semitism, a racist European doctrine which saw the Jew as an alien who belonged to the Middle East. Now, ironically, anti-Zionism inverts this theory and characterizes the Jews as a European people who have no place in their Middle Eastern ancestral homeland. This merciless persecution of the Jews has always been accompanied by libelous slogans. In the super stitious age of devout religion the blood libel supposedly exposed how Jews murder Gentile children to drain their blood for use in ritual sorcery. Part and parcel of classic anti-Semitism is the belief that an international Jewish conspiracy of capitalists and communists is plotting to take over the world. And now Jewish enemies have spawned the lie that Zionism is a racist and fascist ideology. The probiem is that there are delicate distinctions between anti- Zionism and anti-Semitism. This makes anti-Zionism a disease that is cunningly resistant to many of the medicines traditionally used to treat anti-Semitism. While anti- Semitism has always focused on groundless lies, anti-Zionism is built around distortions and half-truths. Zionism as a legitimate liberation movement is denied, as the notion of the Jews being a nation is negated. Actions of the Israeli government are taken out of context in order to legitimate the liquidation of the Jewish state. Amidst the confusion the Irish diplomat and journalist Connor Cruse O’Brien has coined a new phrase: anti-Jewism. Here the semantic threat to Jews is made explicit and is not dressed up in euphemistic words like anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Gideon Raphael, a former director- general of Israel’s Foreign Office is emphatic about what must be done. “The resolution is a battle cry not only against Israel and Zionism but against human decency,” he stresses. “The strategy of our adver saries is: defamation, isolation, liquidation. We have to mobilize the freedom loving forces in the world and to clean the U.N. of this mark of shame.” Israel’s enemies in this battle are the Soviet Union, the Arab world and in the West, groups of neo- Nazis and small factions of Marxists, Trotskyists and anarchists. For the Soviet Union, Israel represents the freedom of the western democracies, while for the Arab world Israel symbolizes the secularism of the West. But by repeating “the big lie” and making Israel synonymous with racism, the Jewish state’s potential enemies can multiply. As Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., states, “It is important to remember that inside the U.N. racism is the ultimate crime.” She says, “When Israel is designated a racist state, the word is out that Israel is fair game for every would be aggressor in the world." Furthermore, many of Israel’s supporters, even Jews in the Diaspora, are beginning to believe the lie because it is not being effectively countered. Students on university campuses in the West have take the brunt of anti-Zionist propaganda. See Zionism, page 5. ^Se Southern Israelite The Weekly Newspaper For Southern Jewry 'Since 1925' Vol. LXI Atlanta, Georgia, Friday, November 1, 1985 No. 44 Reagan says human rights won’t be big issue in Vienna by Joseph Polakoff TSl's Washington correspondent WASHINGTON —President Reagan has indicated that the human rights issue will not be a major subject at his summit conference with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Vienna later this month. In an interview with the British Broad casting Corporation (BBC), the president was asked how he felt about the visa having been granted to Mrs. Yelena Bonner, wife of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, to come to the West for medical treatments. The president said he felt it is “a step along the road” toward improve ment in the Soviet Union’s treatment of dissidents. He went on to say, “There need to be more cases of exist visas such as that granted M rs. Bonner.” keagan said that “I don’t think, however, that the human rights thing” should be “a kind of a public discussion and accusing fingers being pointed at each other and their claim that this is an internal matter with them.” “What they (the Soviets) have to understand is that on some of the major areas where we could seek agreement,” the president said, “We have a better chance in our type of society of getting the approval that we need from our Congress, from our people, on some of these agree ments if these human rights problems are not standing in the way. And maybe 1 can point that out.” Regarding terrorism, the president said in the BBC interview that the United States “had no choice” in the interception of the Egyptian plane carrying the four Palestinian hijackers of the Achille Lauro. He pointed out that the United States had to take the action “if we were going to prevent those terrorists from suddenly, as many in the past have, disappearing into the rabbit warren that is found in the Middl East—Lebanon and so forth—am therefore they would escape being brought to justice. They had murdered a man, a helpless individual.” The president’s interview came as the Soviet Union issued an exit visa to Irinia Grivnina, 40, a Jewish member of the group investigating Soviet use of psychiatric hospitals to confine dissidents. Grivnina arrived with her family in Amsterdam where her case received wide attention because her arrival came three days before the Dutch government is to announce its decision on the deployment of U.S. medium range missiles. The Soviet Union has vigorously opposed this deployment. The Bonner and Grivnina de partures indicated that the Soviet Union was apparently using Soviet Jews to influence decisions of a military and political nature apart from human rights aspects of them. When Steve Mendel and Dan Berman visited the Soviet Union recently “to encourage the refusniks to continue their fight for freedom,” the trip ended abruptly when the two Atlantans were expelled by Soviet authorities. Deeply touched by the plight of Jewish refusniks in the Soviet Union, 23-year-old Mendel and Berman, 24, went to Russia to see what contribution they could make to the refusniks’ cause. During the trip, the two young men not only got a better understanding of the refusniks’ lives and problems, but came face-to-face with the authori tarian policies of the Soviet govern ment. A Jewish organization, which Mendel declines to identify, sponsored their trip which began on Sept. 21 and was scheduled to last until Oct. 9, but was cut short by the expulsion. Mendel and Bergman obtained a list of refusnik names and addresses from local organizations, and were interested in visiting families who had been refusniks for a long time and had been denied exit visas despite the fact that members of their families had been allowed to emigrate to Israel. They began their trip by contacting Atlantans expelled by Soviets for offering comfort to refusniks by Allen Rabinowitz Refusnik Seman Indiktor (left) and Steve Mendel. families in Leningrad, Minsk and Vilnius. “In Leningrad,” Mendel explains, “we didn’t have any problems with the police. We felt we were being followed, but it was difficult to tell. In Minsk, we still didn’t feel like we were being followed, but we understood from people who had been through before and the refusniks we were visiting that Minsk was one of the more difficult cities to be involved in activities. On our third day there we were visiting refusniks when we were brought in by the KGB Their excuse was that they wanted to make sure that our papers were in order. A captain from Ovir—the immigration and visa department— came and interrogated us for two hours.” They were warned that they would be contacted in the other cities on their agenda. When they reached Vilnius, the authorities again brought them in and warned them to dis continue their contacts with the refusniks. They asked the police if See Expelled, page 28. uNIv of GF JFGIA A ['Fit NS J A 3 L)0U2