Word: zionism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHEN FIDEL CASTRO spoke last week before the United Nations General Assembly, his condemnation of Israel rolled out easily. His attack marked the high point of the savagery levelled at Israel from the rest of the General Assembly. When he bound Zionism to Nazism, Castro mocked two concepts dear to the Jewish people--the integrity of history and the integrity of language. As Castro brandished the term "genocide" he trivialized, for the sake of immediate political gain, the past suffering of the Jews. But far more dangerously, this reckless misuse of the term bodes ill for oppressed all over...
...happen. Many have done this. One British historian alleges that the entire event was a fiction. But of far more impact have been attempts to destroy the cachet of uniqueness, the special horror that the U.N. documents accorded to this newly named crime. The 1976 U.N. resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism, was tha most visible effort to accomplish this...
...resolution constituted a conscious attempt to equate Zionism with obvious examples of racism. Tiamiou Adjibade, the U.N. delegate from Dahomey, admitted that "in essence Zionism was not related to apartheid", yet in the same breath he linked the two. American publications made the same spurious connection. One letter drew an explicit analogy between South Africa and Israel, terming Jewish fear of anti-semitism a 'red herring...
...General Assembly floor in '76, some noticed the dangers of this situation. David Wilson, the delegate from Liberia, noted that in the debate on Zionism as racism, "in all those brilliant and eloquent statements not one word had been said about the Programme for the Decade designed to help our brothers and sisters some of whom were languishing in the prisions in Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa...
Ivor Richard, Britain's representative to the U.N., stated at the time that to "stigmatize Zionism with racism was to confuse racism and racial discrimination with nationalism". For Castro, to stigmatize Israel with Genocide is to confuse a continuing political struggle with the organized mass murder of the Palestinian people...