Posted on 05/07/2026 4:26:56 PM PDT by Milagros
San Francisco Bay area.. witnessing mounting anti-Israel agitation in the wake of American co-sponsorship of a United Nations Security Council resolution censuring Israel.
Mohammed T. Mehdi, director of the Arab Information Center of San Francisco, ...
He was asked by a good-hearted Westerner why the Arabs and Jews can't live together in peace. Mehdi's reply: “Would you want to live with them?” This occasioned an outburst on the part of the questioner, a non-Jew, provoked by the obvious anti-Semitism.
Lilian McPherson, another non-Jew, writing on the editorial page of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury said: “One wonders about Dr. Mehdi's techniques and ultimate objectives. Especially, I say this, after attending a student meeting at San Jose State, where Arab students heckled a speaker on Israel by saying, ‘Too bad Hitler didn't finish the job.’” She went on to describe Dr. Mehdi's links with the Arab Students Organization at San Jose State College.
When Arab propagandist Fayez A. Sayegh, a visiting professor of political science at another West coast university, addressed San Jose students, he was enthusiastically introduced by a faculty member. The host admits John Birch Society membership and was the subject of controversy when he asked “patriotic” students to report “subversive” statements by instructors and fellow students..
A seminar on “Social Change In The Middle East,” sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Northern California, featured six “authorities” — all pro-Arab. Anti-Israel reading lists were distributed. Registrants included Admiral M. P. Evenson, director of the so-called “American Friends of the Middle East” ...
An Israeli Arab Christian, visiting the area to observe labor unions of Histadrut, was threatened with death by an unruly mob of Arab students at Stanford University in Palo Alto. Invited to speak before a campus group, the Israeli Arab was rudely harassed, called “traitor”...
(Excerpt) Read more at books.google.com ...
The Muslims haven't changed. What has changed is they now are with the Democrats.
Even Muhammad Ali was a Reagan supporter.
True
How Arab Propagandists and Their Friends Work in America.
Hon. James H. Scheuer. Of New York. In the House of Representatives. Tuesday, April 15, 1969.
... It is a commonly heard complaint from Arab quarters that their cause has "no voice" in America. In point of fact, the exact opposite is the case. Each of the 14 Arab states has its own delegation—and usually its own Informer officer—at the United Nations. On top of that. the Arab Information Center, operating for all of the Arab League states, maintains headquarters in New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francesco and Dallas—plus a representative in Florida.
There is also the Palestine Arab Delegation—which purports torepresent the indigenous[sic] Arab inhabitants of Palestine, but is actually the registered agency for the Arab Higher Committee of Palestine, headed by Haj Amin el-Husseini, better known as the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. (He was once Hitler's special adviser on the "final solution of the Jewish problem.")
Most reprehensible of all is the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)—an agency established and financed by the Arab Largos, atates for the express purpose of organizing guerrilla units to invade Israel, in order to bring an end to what it Insits upon calling the "Zionist usurpation" there.
This agency is openly dedicated to defiance of United Nations peacekeeping resolution...
The mere presence of so many Arab state delegations at the United Nations provides kind of built-in advantage for certain propaganda purposes When Security Council denotes are televised. for Instance, thenmber of minutes given to Arab spokesmen and their supporters is invariably several times greater than those given to Israel and her usually less-verbose friends.
On these decisions, moreover, the Arabs have generally seen fit to play fast and loose with the ordinary rules of diplomatic courtesy, while objecting to any slight technical deviation from the ruled by those on the other side...
The expenditures of the Palestine Arab Delegation are much smaller than those of the Arab Information Center (with its numerous branches), but its activities are a matter of special concern, because unlike most foreign propaganda agencies this 'delegation' concerns itself very directly with internal affairs of the United States...
…the same methods, would be hustled out of the country at once, or put in jail.
NEO-NAZIS AIDED.
Even more reprehensible, however, is the relationship which this agency has built up with some of the more extreme hate-groups in the United States, where the obvious effort is to set American citizens of different religions against each other. At one period, indeed, the 'Delegation' actually permitted a self-avowed neo-Nazi group, the National Renaissance Party, to use the Arab postage meter for the purpose of mailing out the 'Party’s' own vicious anti-Jewish publication. On another occasion, “literature” written by the Palestine Arab Delegation was made available for printing in *Common Sense* (described in a staff report of the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “the source of some of the most vitriolic hate propaganda ever to come to this Committee’s attention”)—and the material actually appeared in two editions of *Common Sense* even before the Delegation got around to issuing its own pamphlet edition. Other hate-literature from the same source has been extensively used by Gerald L. K. Smith, and equally notorious American anti-Jewish agitators.
It is one thing to advocate a national cause; it is something quite different for a foreign agency to try to stir up dissension in a country with which peaceful relations presumably prevail.
We should emphasize here that the Palestine Arab Delegation is not a self-supported group of agitators. It has filed its official registration papers with the Department of Justice (Foreign Agent Registration No. 1459) as an agency of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, with headquarters at Almansurieh, Lebanon; and the Higher Committee’s Chairman, the former Grand Mufti, is listed as residing in Egypt, near Cairo. Early publications of the “Delegation” list support from the four Arab states surrounding Israel, but more recently only the Higher Committee’s sponsorship appeared. The “Delegation” is recognized at the United Nations, to the extent of appearing before various official committees, where it claims to represent the Arab Palestinians. These facts make its uninvited intervention in America’s domestic affairs all the more inexcusable.
STUDENTS USED AS AGITATORS.
A survey of this subject would be incomplete without mention of the Organization of Arab Students in the United States and Canada, which has units on over a hundred American college campuses. The United States welcomes students from all parts of the world, and tries to help them secure an education—but in this particular case, the students who belong to the Organization are also told to consider themselves as political spokesmen for the views of their home governments. The Organization prints an elaborate magazine, which contains some of the most violent anti-Israel propaganda that we have seen—and its national convention has entertained speakers from the Palestine Liberation Organizations. Apart from other considerations, it seems hardly appropriate for an organization of foreign students, with obvious support from outside governments, to engage in such activities while its members are guests in our own country.
At its last-year’s National Convention the Organization of Arab Students honored Dr. M. T. Mehdi as its “Man of the Year.” Dr. Mehdi, a former employee of the Arab Information Center (at its San Francisco branch), now heads The Action Committee on American-Arab Relations, an ostensibly domestic agency which describes itself as “an organization dedicated to better American-Arab understanding.”
Dr. Mehdi’s principal claim to fame, however, is the authorship of a book entitled “Kennedy and Sirhan, Why?”—the outrageous theme of which is that the Jordanian assassin of the late Senator Robert Kennedy ought to be thought of as a political prisoner, instead of being tried for murder in the ordinary way in the courts of California.
“Sirhan’s act is not an ordinary case of murder: it is a political act and political assassination. Hence traditional legal devices and legal remedies cannot adequately provide proper defense for the accused,” we are told. Mehdi, in effect, tries to make Sirhan’s terrible crime into a mere incident in the war between Arabs and Israelis (with the late senator classified as an Israeli protagonist). The idea is thus suggested that Sirhan should be treated as “a prisoner of war,” with Kennedy classified as “a casualty in that war.”
Must our government tolerate this? In short, Arab propaganda runs the entire gamut from slick-paper appeals intended to influence people with cultural and intellectual curiosity, to the stirring up of race hatreds, the organization of guerrillas, and even a quasi-exculpation of assassination.
Some aspects of this agitation are almost certainly contrary to American law, and are certainly in violation of good public policy. There is no excuse to permit the intentional stirring up of group hatreds in this country by people acting in the name of a foreign government, and our international obligations are clearly inconsistent with allowing the continued operation of militarist-terrorist groups like the Palestine Liberation Organization.
From Look magazine, August 8, 1967.
Israel: A Nation Too Young to Die. (By James Michener) [...]
On the night when the defeat of the Arab armies was known to the world as one of the most crushing in history. I discussed matters on an all-night radio show with Dr. T. Mehdi, secretary-general of the Action Committee on Arab-American Relations. And he made these points:
"Nothing has changed. Israel is worse[sic] than Nazi Germany, and the Arabs will have to drive her from the region. The war will continue precisely as it has been going for the past 19 years. And what the American and the English took away from the Arabs by their intervention, the Arabs will recover at the conference table. Peace talks, of course, will have to be conducted through third parties at the United Nations, because no Arab leader will ever negotiate directly with Israel. You'll see. The United Nations will force Israel back to her 1948 boundaries, after which all Arab nations will unite in a war to exterminate her, because this is going to be just like the Crusades. Peace talks will fail. The Arabs will continue their fight and in the end they'll do exactly what they've said. Push Israel into the sea."
Nasser will probably gain more from the Arab world in defeat than he would have gained in victory. The war made him a tragic hero. His people will forget about his military failures. Soon, his new crop of generals will be making the old speeches of 1948, 1956 and 1967. His people will believe them, for fantasy is impossible to eradicate if one's whole culture is structured on the perpetuation of the fantasy. Yet we must dispel that fantasy. To do so is the job to which we are all committed... unless we are content to watch this pathetic farce of Arab self-delusion repeated in 1977, 1988 and 1999.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.