Focus on Jews and Israel

By Andrea Barron

David McCalden, a British neo-fascist now living in California, has long been a leader of the movement which seeks to prove that the Holocaust, in which 6,000,000 European Jews were exterminated, never really happened. Now he and Massachusetts carpenter David Wayfield have decided to build a "Garden of Remembrance for Righteous Hebrews" on Martha's Vineyard, a scenic island off the Massachusetts coast.

The McCalden garden is obviously meant to be a parody of the Garden of Righteous Gentiles, located in Jerusalem's Yad VaShem museum. The Jerusalem museum honors Christians who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi concentration camps. McCalden, on the other hand, wants to pay tribute to what he calls the "courage and honesty of those Jews who have spoken out against the cult of Zionism."

According to The Jewish Advocate, a Boston weekly, Professor Noam Chomsky and Rabbi Elmer Berger, director of American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ) are among the "Righteous Hebrews" selected by McCalden. So are two Washingtonians—anti-Zionist lawyer and author Alfred Lilienthal and Haviv Schieber of the United Holy Land Fund. But Professor Chomsky, a long-time critic of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, said McCalden is probably part of an "ultra-right, neo-Nazi lunatic fringe movement" with which he wants nothing to do.

Rabbi Rayfield Helman of Martha's Vineyard Hebrew Center told the Jewish Advocate that the proposed Garden "goes against the grain of everything the Island stands for," and that the community would try to "thwart" the project. Helman is likely to receive widespread support: few people on the Vineyard believe that the Holocaust is a fabrication.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, meanwhile, is trying to achieve something far more difficult than shutting down a project conceived by an extreme right-wing, British expatriate. Last month the Conference, an umbrella group of over 40 national Jewish organizations, called on Attorney General Edwin Meese to close the Washington, DC office of the Palestine Liberation Organization, claiming that the office has been used to "advance the terrorist cause."

Conference President Morris Abram sent a telegram to Meese saying "the PLO's goal is to 'purge the Zionist presence' from the Middle East" through violence, and that members of the organization threaten the safety of Americans by acting as "Soviet spys ... under the guise of diplomatic representation." The telegram was prompted by the recent attack on Israeli soldiers and their families at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The father of one soldier was killed and 69 other persons were injured in the attack, for which the PLO claimed responsibility.

The Washington Jewish Week echoed the Conference of Presidents, declaring in a lead editorial that "shutting down the PLO's American operation ... is an idea whose time has definitely come." Washington Jewish Week also quoted from a letter sent to Secretary of State George Shultz by conservative Congressman Jack Kemp (R-NY) which stated: "Terrorists (like the PLO) are not welcome in the United States nor in any country that values human decency and human lives."

Kemp, who hopes to be the Republican Presidential nominee in 1988, urged Shultz to "expel foreign PLO operatives" now in the US. But the Administration would face an almost unprecedented legal problem if it sought to expel at least one of these "operatives." Hassan Abdel-Rahman, director of the PLO Information Office in Washington, is a US citizen.

Like the Conference of Presidents and Washington Jewish Week, Washington Area Jews for an Israeli-Palestinian Peace (WAJIPP) also condemned the attack at the Wailing Wall. But WAJIPP has, at the same time, declared its support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In a recent commentary in Washington Jewish Week, which appeared as an advertisement, WAJIPP argued that such a state would "solidify the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty," and therefore actually enhance Israeli security. A Palestinian state, the commentary continued, would defuse the "politics of terror" and improve Israel's national morale by ending its rule over "1.3 unwilling subjects."

This commentary was part of a series of advertisements that WAJIPP has placed in Washington Jewish Week over the past several months. WAJIPP member Mark P. Cohen, who conceived the idea, said the group wanted to reach mainstream Jews, to "speak from within the Jewish community, to that community." This is critical, he said, "since no change is likely to take place in US foreign policy until the Jewish community becomes more receptive to other potential solutions to the conflict between Arabs and Jews."

Andrea Barron, a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at American University in Washington, DC, writes frequently about Middle East issues. She is active in WAJIPP and New Jewish Agenda.

Focus on Arabs and Islam

By Anthony Toth

Major Arab-American groups used different strategies in the recent elections, with mixed results. Here is an election strategy followed by one of the Arab-American groups:

NAAA Highlights Bob Kasten's Pro-Israel Giveaways

The National Association of Arab Americans (NAAA) followed a two-pronged strategy for the 1986 elections. At the grassroots level, the organization encouraged Arab-American involvement in 80 key congressional campaigns. On the national level, NAAA's Political Action Committee (PAC) focused its limited resources on an attempt to elect Ed Garvey, who was challenging incumbent Sen. Robert Kasten (R-Wisconsin).

NAAA keyed in on this race because Kasten is chairman of the Senate Foreign Operations Committee and is an unquestioning advocate of US aid to Israel. In the last four days of the campaign, NAAA PAC took out radio spots in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, and La Crosse asking whether the $17 billion "foreign aid giveaway" to Israel over which Kasten has presided during his six-year-tenure was fair to Wisconsin's farmers and factory workers, who have been subjected to increasing economic hardships in recent years.

The ads also stated that Kasten had received more contributions from pro-Israel PACs than any other Republican Senator. According to NAAA PAC's research, Kasten accepted at least $117,000 from pro-Israel PACs—all of them from outside Wisconsin!

A NAAA PAC press release in Wisconsin stated that "Kasten's use of his committee position to deliver billions of dollars to Israel, and then financing his campaign with money from pro-Israel committees, is an unsavory and unacceptable conflict of interest."

Said NAAA PAC Executive Director David Sadd, "it is particularly disturbing when you consider that Kasten has sponsored legislation to ease Israel's debt obligations to the United States at a time when more than 2,000 Wisconsin farmers behind on their Farm Housing Authority loan payments seek debt relief."

Despite the NAAA PAC effort, Kasten defeated Garvey in a close race.

ADC Leadership Training

As Campaign '86 wound down, activists and leaders of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) went to the mountains of West Virginia to exchange ideas and attend workshops designed to sharpen their organizational, political, and fund-raising skills.

Some 100 ADC regional leaders from Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Boston, and other cities spent four days in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. The training session included brainstorming sessions on future projects, pep talks, and seminars on the nuts-and-bolts of grassroots organizing and political action. In addition, the conference also offered activists the opportunity to meet new ADC President Abdeen Jabara. One activist from San Antonio, Texas, remarked that the conference had a very full schedule, but that was because there was so much work to be done.

Anthony Toth is a Virginia-based free-lance writer specializing in Middle Eastern and East European affairs.