[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 107 (Friday, July 27, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8341-S8343]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO SENATOR MOYNIHAN AND HIS LEGACY OF DEFENDING ZIONISM
Mrs. CLINTON. Madam President, I rise today to honor one of the
extraordinary legacies of my predecessor, Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, who served in this body for 24 years representing the people
of New York.
With some seeking to insert contentious language regarding Zionism
into declarations emerging from the upcoming United Nations World
Conference Against Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related
Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, I am reminded of Senator
Moynihan's courageous statesmanship, when he condemned the 1975 U.N.
resolution 3379 which infamously declared ``Zionism is a form of racism
and racial discrimination.''
We should never forget the historic battle my predecessor waged to
defeat this outrageous effort to de-legitimize the state of Israel and
defame the Jewish people. Over 25 years ago, Senator Moynihan boldly
called this hate-filled language ``criminal.'' It was criminal then and
it's still criminal today.
On the day the resolution passed, Senator Moynihan declared, ``the
United States . . . will never acquiesce in this infamous act . . . A
political lie of a variety well known to the twentieth century and
scarcely exceeded in all the annals of untruth and outrage. The lie is
that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelming truth is that it is
not.''
From the moment he entered the Senate in January 1977, Senator
Moynihan dedicated much of his energy to repealing this despicable
attack on Israel and the Jewish people, delivering passionate speeches
on the Senate floor. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Senator Moynihan
introduced Joint Resolution 246, which called on the U.N. to repeal the
1975 resolution.
It took 17 long years to remove this stain from the United Nations'
reputation. And as we begin this new century, nothing could be more
damaging to the promise and integrity of the U.N. than to revive to
this ignominious statement. In order to help prevent the U.N. from
reviving one of the moments of its greatest shame, Senators Schumer,
Smith, Lugar and I have written the following letter to Kofi Annan, the
Secretary General of the United Nations, condemning any attempts to
include inflammatory anti-Israel language into declarations associated
with the World Conference Against Racism in Durban.
I ask unanimous consent that the letter be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the letter was ordered to be printed in the
Record, as follows:
July 27, 2001.
Hon. Kofi A. Annan,
Secretary General of the United Nations, The United Nations,
New York, NY.
Dear Secretary General Annan: We are writing to express our
serious concern regarding recent efforts to insert
contentious language into declarations emerging from the
upcoming United Nations World Conference Against Racism in
Durban, South Africa. Such language, such as ``the racist
practices of Zionism,'' undermines the goals of the
conference to eradicate hatred and promote understanding.
This meeting of the international community should not be a
forum to encourage divisiveness, but a time to foster greater
understanding between people of all races, creeds, and
ethnicities.
As you know, on November 10, 1975, the United Nations
General Assembly designated Zionism a form of racism. It took
sixteen long years for the United Nations to acknowledge that
this offensive language had no place at such an important
world body. In March of 1998, you appropriately condemned
this ugly formulation when you noted that the ``lamentable
resolution'' equating Zionism with racism and racial
discrimination was ``the low-point'' in Jewish-UN relations.
Our former colleague Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called
this designation by the United Nations ``criminal.''
Though this ``Zionism equals racism'' language was
overwhelmingly rescinded in 1991 by the General Assembly,
this issue is far from resolved. With the Palestinians and
Israelis in the middle of a delicate cease-fire and after
months of violence, we believe that gratuitously anti-Israel,
anti-Jewish language at a UN forum will serve only to
exacerbate existing tensions in the Middle East.
Mr. Secretary, we in Congress applaud your hard work in
restoring the reputation of the UN. We urge you to continue
your efforts by advocating to all nations of the world the
importance of keeping inflammatory language out of this
important conference. It is our hope that the Conference on
Racism remains only as an opportunity to promote peace and
reconciliation among all people, not one to target Israel or
Jews. We
[[Page S8342]]
share a deep common interest in seeing the conference stay
focused and embody a sense of unity in the fight against
racism. Thank you for your attention to this matter of great
importance.
Sincerely,
Charles E. Schumer,
Hillary Rodham Clinton,
Gordon Smith,
Richard G. Lugar,
United States Senate.
Mrs. CLINTON. In 1975, Senator Moynihan warned his colleagues at the
U.N. and the rest of the world that: ``As this day will live in infamy,
it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so
that historians will know that we fought here . . . with full knowledge
of what indeed would be lost.''
Senator Moynihan recognized then, as we do today, that this language
only serves to fuel hatred and bigotry throughout the world and has no
place in international discourse. I am honored to have followed Senator
Moynihan in the Senate, and I pledge to continue his tradition of
promoting the principles of decency and human dignity and opposing
efforts to sow hatred and bigotry, especially when they are cloaked in
the guise of diplomacy.
I ask unanimous consent that the attached statement be printed for
the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Speech to the United Nations General Assembly, by U.S. Ambassador to
the U.N. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, November 10, 1975
The United States rises to declare before the General
Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it
does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never
acquiesce in this infamous act.
Not three weeks ago, the United States Representative in
the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee pleaded in
measured and fully considered terms for the United Nations
not to do this thing. It was, he said, ``obscene.'' It is
something more today, for the furtiveness with which this
obscenity first appeared among us has been replaced by a
shameless openness.
There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act
will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that
for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note the
foreboding fact. A great evil has been loosed upon the world.
The abomination of anti-semitism--as this year's Nobel Peace
Laureate Andrei Sakharov observed in Moscow just a few days
ago--the Abomination of anti-semitism has been given the
appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly
today grants symbolic amnesty--and more--to the murderers of
the six million European Jews. Evil enough in itself, but
more ominous by far is the realization that now presses upon
us--the realization that if there were no General Assembly,
this could never have happened.
As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who
sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that
historians will know that we fought here, that we were not
small in number--not this time--and that while we lost, we
fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost.
Nor should any historian of the event, nor yet any who have
participated in it, suppose, that we have fought only as
governments, as chancelleries, and on an issue well removed
from the concerns of our respective peoples. Others will
speak for their nations: I will speak for mine.
In all our postwar history there had not been another issue
which has brought forth such unanimity of American opinion.
The President of the United States has from the first been
explicit: This must not happen. The Congress of the United
States in a measure unanimously adopted in the Senate and
sponsored by 436 of 437 Representatives in the House,
declared its utter opposition. Following only American Jews
themselves, the American trade union movements was first to
the fore in denouncing this infamous undertaking. Next, one
after another, the great private institutions of American
life pronounced anathema in this evil thing--and most
particularly, the Christian churches have done so. Reminded
that the United Nations was born in struggle against just
such abominations as we are committing today--the wartime
alliance of the United Nations dates from 1942--the United
Nations Association of the United States has for the first
time in its history appealed directly to each of the 141
other delegations in New York not to do this unspeakable
thing.
The proposition to be sanctioned by a resolution of the
General Assembly of the United Nations is that ``Zionism is a
form of racism and racial discrimination.'' Now this is a
lie. But as it is a lie which the United Nations has now
declared to be a truth, the actual truth must be restated.
The very first point to be made is that the United Nations
has declared Zionism to be racism--without ever having
defined racism. ``Sentence first--verdict afterwards,'' as
the Queen of Hearts said. But this is not wonderland, but a
real world, where there are real consequences to folly and to
venality. Just on Friday, the President of the General
Assembly, speaking on behalf of Luxembourg, warned not only
of the trouble which would follow from the adoption of this
resolution but of its essential irresponsibility--for, he
noted, members have wholly different ideas as to what they
are condemning. It seems to me that before a body like this
takes a decision they should agree very clearly on what they
are approving or condemning, and it takes more time.''
Lest I be unclear, the United Nations has in fact on
several occasions defined ``racial discrimination.'' The
definitions have been loose, but recognizable. It is
``racism,'' incomparably the more serious charge--racial
discrimination is a practice; racism is a doctrine--which has
never been defined. Indeed, the term has only recently
appeared in the United Nations General Assembly documents.
The one occasion on which we know the meaning to have been
discussed was the 1644th meeting of the Third Committee on
December 16, 1968, in connection with the report of the
Secretary-General on the status of the international
convention on the elimination of all racial discrimination.
On that occasion--to give some feeling for the intellectual
precision with which the matter was being treated--the
question arose, as to what should be the relative positioning
of the terms ``racism'' and ``Nazism'' in a number of the
``preambular paragraphs.'' The distinguished delegate from
Tunisia argued that ``racism'' should go first because
``Nazism was merely a form of racism.'' Not so, said the no
less distinguished delegate from the Union Soviet Socialist
Republics. For, he explained, ``Nazism contained the main
elements of racism within its ambit and should be
mentioned first.'' This is to say that racism was merely a
form of Nazism.
The discussion wound to its weary and inconclusive end, and
we are left with nothing to guide us for even this one
discussion of ``racism'' confined itself to world orders in
preambular paragraphs, and did not at all touch on the
meaning of the words as such. Still, one cannot but ponder
the situation we have made for ourselves in the context of
the Soviet statement on that not so distant occasion. If, as
the distinguished delegate declared, racism is a form of
Nazism--and if, as this resolution declares, Zionism is a
form of racism--then we have step to step taken ourselves to
the point of proclaiming--the United Nations is solemnly
proclaiming--that Zionism is a form of Nazism.
What we have here is a lie--a political lie of a variety
well known to the twentieth century, and scarcely exceeded in
all that annal of untruth and outrage. The lie is that
Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth
is that is it not.
The word ``racism'' is a creation of the English language,
and relatively new to it. It is not, for instance, to be
found in the Oxford English Dictionary (appears in 1982
supplement to Oxford Dictionary). The term derives from
relatively new doctrines--all of them discredited--concerning
the human population of the world, to the effect that there
are significant biological differences among clearly
identifiable groups, and that these differences establish, in
effect, different levels of humanity. Racism, as defined in
Webster's Third New International Dictionary, is ``The
Assumption that . . . traits and capacities are determined by
biological race and that races differ decisively from one
another.'' It further involves ``a belief in the inherent
superiority of a particular race and its right to dominate
over others.''
This meaning is clear. It is equally clear that this
assumption, this belief, has always been altogether alien to
the political and religious movement known as Zionism. As a
strictly political movement, Zionism was established only in
1897, although there is a clearly legitimate sense in which
its origins are indeed ancient. For example, many branches of
Christianity have always held that from the standpoint of
biblical prophets, Israel would be reborn one day. But the
modern Zionism movement arose in Europe in the context of a
general upsurge of national consciousness and aspiration that
overtook most other people of Central and Eastern Europe
after 1848, and that in time spread to all of Africa and
Asia. It was, to those persons of the Jewish religion, a
Jewish form of what today is called a national liberation
movement. Probably a majority of those persons who became
active Zionism and sought to emigrate to Palestine were born
within the confines of Czarist Russia, and it was only
natural for Soviet Prime Minister Andrei Gromyko to deplore,
as he did in 1948, in the 299th meeting of the Security
Council, the act by Israel's neighbors of ``sending troops
into Palestine and carrying out military operations aimed''--
in Mr. Gromyko's words--at the suppression of the national
liberation movement in Palestine.''
Now it was the singular nature--if, I am not mistaken, it
was the unique nature--of this national liberation movement
that in contrast with the movements that preceded it, those
of that time, and those that have come since, it defined
its members in terms not of birth, but of belief. That is
to say, it was not a movement of the Irish to free
Ireland, or of the Polish to free Poland, not a movement
of the Algerians to free Algeria, nor of Indians to free
India. It was not a movement of persons connected by
historic membership to a genetic pool of the kind that
enables us to speak loosely but not meaninglessly, say, of
the Chinese people, nor yet of diverse groups occupying
the same territory which enables us to speak if the
American people with no greater indignity to truth. To the
contrary, Zionists defined
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themselves merely as Jews, and declared to be Jewish
anyone born of a Jewish mother or--and this is the
absolutely crucial fact--anyone who converted to Judaism.
Which is to say, in terms of International Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,
adopted by the 20th General Assembly, anyone--regardless
of ``race, colour, descent, or nationally or ethnic origin
. . .''
The state of Israel, which in time was the creation of the
Zionist Movement, has been extraordinary in nothing so much
as the range of ``racial stocks'' from which it Orient and
Jew from the West. Most such persons could be said to have
been ``born'' Jewish, just as most Presbyterians and most
Hindus are ``born'' to their faith, but there are many Jews
who are just converts. With a consistency in the matter which
surely attests to the importance of this issue to that
religions and political culture, Israeli courts have held
that a Jew who converts to another religion is no longer a
Jew. Inn the meantime the population of Israel also includes
large numbers of non-Jews, among them Arabs of both the
Muslim and Christian religions and Christians of other
national origins. Many of these persons are citizens of
Israel, and those who are not can become citizens by legal
procedures very much like those which obtain in a typical
nation of Western Europe.
Now I should wish to be understood that I am here making
one point, and one point only, which is that whatever else
Zionism may be, it is not and cannot be ``a form of racism.''
In logic, the State of Israel could be, or could become, many
things, theoretically, including many things undesirable, but
it could not be and could not become racism unless it ceased
to be Zionist.
Indeed, the idea that Jews are a ``race'' was invented not
by Jews but by those who hated Jews. The idea of Jews as a
race was invented by nineteenth century anti-semites such as
Houston Steward Chamberlain and Edouard Drumont, who saw that
in an increasingly secular age, which is to say an age made
for fewer distinctions between people, the old religions
grounds for anti-semitism were losing force. New
justifications were needed for excluding and persecuting
Jews, and so the new idea of Jews as a race--rather than as a
religion--was born. It was a contemptible idea at the
beginning, and no civilized person would be associated with
it. To think that it is an idea now endorsed by the United
Nations is to reflect on what civilization has come to.
It is precisely a concern for civilization, for civilized
values that are or should be precious to all mankind, that
arouses us at this moment to such special passion. What we
have at stake here is not merely the honor and the legitimacy
of the State of Israel--although a challenge to the
legitimacy of any member nation ought always to arouse the
vigilance of all members of the United Nations. For a yet
more important matter is at issue, which is the integrity of
the whole body of moral and legal precepts which we know
as human rights.
The terrible lie that has been told here today will have
terrible consequences. Not only will people begin to say,
indeed they have already begun to say that the United Nations
is a place where lies are told, but far more serious, grave
and perhaps irreparable harm will be done to the cause of
human rights itself. The harm will arise first because it
will strip from racism the precise and abhorrent meaning that
it still precariously holds today. How will the people of the
world feel about racism and the need to struggle against it,
when they are told that it is an idea as broad as to include
the Jewish national liberation movement?
As the lie spreads, it will do harm in a second way. Many
of the members of the United Nations owe their independence
in no small part to the notion of human rights, as it has
spread from the domestic sphere to the international sphere
exercised its influence over the old colonial powers. We are
now coming into a time when that independence is likely to be
threatened again. There will be new forces, some of them
arising now, new prophets and new despots, who will justify
their actions with the help of just such distortions of words
as we have sanctioned here today. Today we have drained the
word ``racism'' of its meaning. Tomorrow, terms like
``national self-determination'' and ``national honor'' will
be perverted in the same way to serve the purposes of
conquest and exploitation. And when these claims begin to be
made--as they already have begun to be made--it is the small
nations of the world whose integrity will suffer. And how
will the small nations of the world defend themselves, on
what grounds will others be moved to defend and protect them,
when the language of human rights, the only language by which
the small can be defended, is no longer believed and no
longer has a power of its own?
There is this danger, and then a final danger that is the
most serious of all. Which is that the damage we now do to
the idea of human rights and the language of human rights
could well be irreversible.
The idea of human rights as we know it today is not an idea
which has always existed in human affairs, it is an idea
which appeared at a specific time in the world, and under
very special circumstances. It appeared when European
philosophers of the seventeenth century began to argue that
man was a being whose existence was independent from that of
the State, that he need join a political community only if he
did not lose by that association more than he gained. From
this very specific political philosophy stemmed the idea of
political rights, of claims that the individual could justly
make against the state; it was because the individual was
seen as so separate from the State that he could make
legitimate demands upon it.
That was the philosophy from which the idea of domestic and
international rights sprang. But most of the world does not
hold with that philosophy now. Most of the world believes in
newer modes of political thought, in philosophies that do not
accept the individual as distinct from and prior to the
State, in philosophies that therefore do not provide any
justification for the idea of human rights and philosophies
that have no words by which to explain their value. If we
destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries, we
will not have words to replace them, for philosophy today has
no such words.
But there are those of us who have not forsaken these older
words, still so new to much of the world. Not forsaken them
now, not here, not anywhere, not ever.
The United States of America declares that it does not
acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in
this infamous act.
____________________