Arabs push UNESCO through resolution vote

‘Zionism equals racism’

Associated Press, Paris

Arabs push UNESCO through resolution vote — The Times Record, 18 December 1975 — The Times Record · 18 December 1975

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Transcribed from the clipping

“PARIS (AP) — Arab states Wednesday pushed through a vote at a meeting of the United Nations Scientific, Educational and Cultural Organization — UNESCO — introducing the explosive ‘Zionism equals racism’ resolution adopted by the U.N. General Assembly this year.

Grim-faced members of the U.S. delegation, who had led a fight against any reference to Zionism at a meeting on the work of the mass media, consulted immediately with Washington on their future action here. There have been suggestions that the United States and some other Western nations were contemplating walking out of the meeting if the vote went through.

The Israeli delegation said before the vote that if it was accepted ‘we will see no further purpose in this meeting.’

The vote came at a meeting of government experts preparing a draft declaration on ‘fundamental principles governing the use of the mass media in strengthening peace and international understanding, and in combating all war propaganda, racism and apartheid.’

The meeting voted, 36 to 22, with seven abstentions, and the rest of the 80-odd delegations absent, to include in the preamble references to the General Assembly’s Zionism resolution and two previous U.N. votes on Zionism.

The vote was on a Yugoslav proposed compromise giving only the numbers of the resolutions, after Arab states led by Algeria had put forward a wording spelling out the alleged link between Zionism and racism.

The document on the mass media has been under discussion at various levels since the idea was first proposed by the Soviet Union in 1972… Voting with the Arab nations were a scattering of other Third World countries and most of the Soviet bloc nations. Many African nations were absent from the session for the vote… U.S. chief delegate Robert F.

Stowe, assistant legal adviser for United Nations affairs at the State Department, said the vote ‘was as much as we had expected, but we had hoped to avoid a vote.’

The United States, backed by the nine European Common Market countries, Australia and Canada, among others, had called for the meeting to continue the consensus policy it had adopted on other portions of the text.”

Context added by this archive

The aftermath of the General Assembly resolution, six weeks later, at a meeting about the mass media. No Palestinian is quoted in it.

Cite this clipping

"Arabs push UNESCO through resolution vote," The Times Record, 18 December 1975, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1975-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1975-007