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South Florida Sun Sentinel · 18 November 2015

CP-2015-004

Anti-Zionism is racism

By Ben Cohen

Anti-Zionism is racism — South Florida Sun Sentinel, 18 November 2015
South Florida Sun Sentinel · 18 November 2015

Transcribed from the clipping

“This month marks the 40th anniversary of one of the worst instances of anti-Semitism since the end of the Second World War. On Nov. 10, 1975, the United Nations — a body created out of the ashes of the Holocaust — passed General Assembly Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, with racism and racial discrimination. That resolution was the culmination of a lengthy campaign by the Soviet Union to turn Israel into the only state within the U.N. system to have its legitimacy questioned… Only a handful of people at the General Assembly grasped this fundamental fact back in 1975. One of them was Chaim Herzog, the Israeli ambassador to the world body… Predictably, the resolution passed. Less predictably, it was rescinded in 1991 — appropriately on the eve of the Soviet Union’s collapse — after a U.S.-led campaign that saw President George H.W. Bush personally introduce the resolution of revocation… But as we know only too well, the slander that Zionism is racism survived that revocation, in much the same way that Holocaust denial has persisted even though it’s illegal in many states. In essence, nothing has really changed: in the name of fighting racism, the same lies and deceits are advanced in order to encourage anti-Semitism.”

Photograph caption

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the American ambassador to the United Nations, addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Nov. 10, 1975, the day the General Assembly adopted the ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution. Moynihan said that the U.S. ‘will never acquiesce in this infamous act.’

Context added by this archive

Forty years on, the headline is the sentence turned around. The column says the resolution was a Soviet campaign. The clippings in this section, printed at the time, show the two words arriving together in an American paper in January 1968 from the chairman of the PLO, on placards in Hamburg in June 1969, in a message from Nasser that September, and in the Black Panther party paper in 1970, before the Soviet Union took the formula to the General Assembly at all.

Cite this item

"Anti-Zionism is racism," South Florida Sun Sentinel, 18 November 2015. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2015-004. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2015-004

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2015-004.

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