THE BRUSSELS CONFERENCE

‘A grotesque camival
of bankrupt racists’

By FILS DELISLE
Tribune Berlin Correspondent

BERLIN — The so-called con-
ference on Soviet Jewry in
Brussels a week ago can be de-
scribed as one of the most shame-
ful demonstrations of the bank-
ruptcy of Israeli and Zionist
leaders.

For the first time in history a
group of self-appointed Jewish
chauvinists demanded the right to
physically dispose of a whole sec-
tion of the population of a
sovereign, independent country.
Supposedly called to defend the
rights of the USSR’s approxi-
mately two-and-a-half million
Jews to live wherever they want,
the conference declared that they
had no right to live in their home-
land, the Soviet Union, must not
be permitted to take up residence
in any country of their choice, but
must be forcibly funneled into the
State of Israel.

Maligns Jews

In a speech that maligned all
Jews living outside of Israel, Josef
Almogi, chairman of the World
Zionist Organization, declared
that all Jews who did not emigrate
to Israel suffered from ‘‘a weak-
ness of will and a lack of under-

standing’. Since approximately .

twelve million Jews in all parts of
the world have rejected the Zion-
. ists’ siren song that they must live
only in Israel, they are all be-
smirched by Almogi’s vitupera-
tion. The ‘Brussels conference
thus not only heard incredible
Zionist claims on Soviet Jewry, it
also heard in the open what is
whispered among Zionist leaders
in Israel: that all Jews outside of
Israel are inferior and submoral
types. In the name of defending
Soviet Jews from a non-existing
anti-Semitic policy in the USSR,
the conference thus became the
platform for a very real and
vicious anti-Semitism levelled at
the overwhelming majority of the
Jews in the world.

In the socialist countries the
congress was seen as a grotesque
carnival of bankrupt racists, an
element of the Israeli leaders’
policies of pyramiding aggres-
sions, a further proof of the Israeli
and Zionist leaders” integration
into the. imperialist system, a
carefully planned circus of the
current intemational drive against
the Soviet Union and the policy of
relaxation of tensions. *

Racist Claim Rejected

This was so self-evident that
the United Press Agency, in a re-
port from Moscow, quoted a
Zionist supporter there as saying
that the Brussels congress was
designed ‘‘to detract from the
Soviet Communist Party Con-
gress’ which opened Feb. 24.

The racist claim of the Israeli
and international Zionist leaders
that Jews cannot live in fraternity
with non-Jews has been rejected
and condemned in the socialist
world since the Russian Revolu-
tion in 1917. Jewish religious and
literary figures in- the Soviet
Union have made that point again
and again. It was also made here
in a statement for the Canadian
Tribune from Helmut Aris, presi-
dent of the Federation of Jewish
Communities in the German
Democratic Republic.

Repudiating the chauvinist
claims of the Zionists, Herr Aris
declared: ‘‘The shopworn thesis
that Jews and non-Jews cannot
live with each other is being
propagated once again. Citizens
of the Jewish faith in the German
Democratic Republic demon-
strate, in the reality of their own
lives in our society, that this
claim, hostile to the human race,
is an absurdity. We show daily, in
practice, that Jews and non-Jews
can most certainly live and work
together in a society liberated
from capitalist exploitation and
oppression, and we do so in com-
plete equality and with complete
security. Claims to.the contrary
twist historical truth. They are an

- Some Soviet facts

on economic growth

In view of allusion by West-
ern economists and journalists
to “economic setbacks of the
Soviets,” Soviet-newsman Alex-
ander Podakin offers these facts:

e In the five-year period 1970-
75, Soviet industrial production
rose by 43%.

e In 1975 alone such produc-
tion rose 7.5%, while in the
USA, Western Europe and Ja-
pan, it dropped by 8 to 10%.

e Guidelines for the next five
years set the Soviet target at a
35 to 39% increase in industrial
production, while many Western
economists admit of a bleak out-
look for capitalism even in 1976.

e The Soviet Union is now
capable of tackling more ambi-
tious projects in line with its
long-term’ social and economic
policies, including raising of
quality in ‘industry.

e The “let-up” (35 to 39%
production increase compared to
43% increase in the previous five
years) will not harm the stan-
dard of living as in the West.

e For many generations Soviet

people have not seen unemploy-
ment. It was done away with 40
years ago when the USSR car-
ried out its first five-year plan.

e Earnings of workers will rise

by 16 to 18%, and of collective
farms by 24 to 27% while prices
remain stable. (Consumer prices
did not change in the past five
years and will not change in the
next five.)
_ @ From “public consumption
funds” every Soviet citizen is
ensured, irrespective of his pay
(that is, without means test)
free education (including higher
education); free medical services;
pensions (non-ontributory); paid
sick leaves, etc. In the new five-
year plan social funds paid out
will increase by 28 to 30%.

Soviet apartment building is
done mainly from allocations
from the national budget, and
the overwhelming majority of
Soviet citizens receive virtually
free accommodation. Rent, heat-
ing, electricity, gas, water, etc.,
make up a mere 4 to 5% of the
family income.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MARCH 12, 1976—Page 8

expression of imperialist policy,
which we reject.”’ oe
Fighter Against Racism

At the Brussels congress, as in
their world-wide activity, the
Israeli and Zionist leaders tried to
conceal the truth about the
present and the past. Just as they
invented a policy of anti-Semitism
in socialism, they hid the fact that
it is precisely the Communist
Parties which have always been,
and are now, the most loyal and
most energetic fighters against
every form of racism, including
anti-Semitism. As at Brussels
they conceal the fact that the
Soviet Union saved innumerable
Jews from Hitler during the war,
they conceal the fact that the
Communist Parties of Europe
were second to none in saving
Jews from the nazi death
chambers elsewhere. They con-
ceal the splendid epic of the Bul-
garian Communist Party, for
example, which, rallying the best
elements in Bulgarian society, ac-
tually saved the entire Jewish
community of Bulgaria, about
50,000 Jews, from annihilation at
the hands of the nazis and their
puppets in Bulgaria, including
King Boris. One of the chief or-
ganizers of this magnificent act of
the Bulgarian people was Todor
Zhivkov, then head of the illegal
Communist Party section in Sofia,
and now Chief of State and gen-
eral secretary of the Bulgarian
Communist Party.

Free of Anti-Semitic Ideas’

One of the most impressive
moral and political achievements
in the German Democratic
Republic has been the building of
a cleansed society in which every
form of racism, bourgeois
nationalism, chauvinism and
anti-Semitism has been weeded
out. Here, in the heartland of
Hitler fascism, in an area which
the nazis turned into a slaughter
house for million of Jews,
Gypsies, Sorbs and people from
all over Europe, socialist society,
under the leadership of the Com-
munists, has created a German
people freed for the first time in
history of all chauvinist, anti-
Semitic and other racist ideas.
History will record that in this
German state the Communists
carried through one of the most
profound and purifying revolu-
tions of this century.

The Brussels congress, on the
other hand, demonstrated that the
Zionists have gone in the opposite
direction, while Golda Meier,
‘star’ of the congress, demanded
the right to dispose of the destiny
of Soviet Jews, the situation in
Israel, where she not long ago
served as Prime Minister, was
dismal and tragic. Meier spoke of
“‘*human rights’’, but the Israeli
Government and the Zionists
maintain the closest ties to the re-
pulsive apartheid government in
South Africa. The Israeli Gov-
emment has imposed a form of
this apartheid regime on the
400,000 Arabs in its own borders.
It is partner to a policy of racist
discrimination against more than
one-and-a-half million Jews —
over 60% of the Jewish popula-
tion — who are darker-skinned
and of African and Oriental
origin.

In the Prayer Hall of the Moscow

Choral Synagogue on the eve of! s,

Torah holiday. In the centre is Rabbi Jacob Leib Fishman during "iq,

ceremony. Behind him is Mikhail Tandetnik, chairman of the board off, h
Jewish religious community in the Soviet capital. Photo below is a N

from the synagogue’s balcony.

. Contempt for Arab Rights

It refuses to permit the more
than one million refugee Arabs to
return to their homes, land and
property in Israel. ‘It shows
nothing but contempt for the
rights of Arabs, and sneers at the
idea of a Palestinian state for
Palestinian Arabs as demanded
by the world in UN resolutions. It
maintains a brutal military dic-

tatorship over more than a million .

Arabs in the territories it occupies
outside of its own borders.

Thus when Israeli spokesmen
like Golda Meier and Zionist
leaders like Josef Almogi do their
bit before a gathering like the
Brussels congress the truth is
easier to perceive. They are not
acting in the interests of Soviet
Jews but against the interests of
Jews everywhere. When they ig-
nore the words of caution from
eminent Jewish leaders like
Nahum Goldman, and claim that
the Soviet Union, which has
banned anti-Semitism, pursues an
anti-Semitic policy, they are de-
liberately seeking to create cracks
in Soviet society, to provoke ill-
feeling between Jewish and non-
Jewish Soviet citizens.

Masquerade in Brussels

The simple truth is that Brus-
sels was a masquerade, that the
leaders of Israel and world Zion-
ism are consciously and deliber-
ately trying to stir up and inflame
anti-Semitism in the Soviet
Union. They are consciously and
deliberately trying to turn Soviet
Jews against their homeland, and
to turn the other Soviet peoples
against the Jews. They are con-
sciously and deliberately trying to
make it difficult for Jews to live
peacefully in the Soviet Union.

As part of this program, they
have agents and supporters in the
Soviet Union — and also in ether
countries — who seek to promote
their aims in collaboration with
old Hitlerites, fascists and assas-
sins, men who participated in the
mass murder of Jews during the
war, national-chauvinist move-
ments today calling for armed ac-

tion to destroy the Soviet Uni?

It is time that this story).
secret, bloody and shameful © f
trayals of Jewish and gene
democratic interests be told.
time to name names. It is time!
Jews everywhere to demand
accounting from Israeli and Zi?)
ist leaders who pretend to sp®
in their name but operate aga!”
their interests.

Canadian book |
exhibit in USSR |

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ter having been on display ©

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books in English and French ff

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convenience of the public are" 4
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