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NewsMax.com, April
11, 2002.
"Why
do Jewish Organizations ignore Cuba's Hatred of Israel?" asks
FrontPageMagazine.com's Myles Kantor in today's online issue.
Cuba's "mass media manifest an open anti-Semitism," wrote Dr.
Oscar Elias Biscet, a Cuban prisoner of conscience in a letter to Coretta Scott
King on Jan. 20, 1999.
"The government is openly partial towards the Arabs while it promotes
contempt for the Israelites."
In a scathing attack on America's Jewish organizations such as the
Anti-Defamation League for failing to condemn Castro's Cuba, Kantor cites
glaring examples of Cuba's open hostility to Jews and the Jewish state that have
been ignored by Jewish groups.
Cuba's support of PLO forces. Kantor quotes Irving Louis Horowitz in the
spring issue of the National Interest that "Training and arming
Palestinians from the PLO forces [by Cuba] is ongoing."
Hundreds of Palestinians received training in Cuba during the 1970s to
promote their objective of national liberation, i.e., Israel's obliteration.
A recent example of Cuba's hostility to Israel is a March 30 story in Granma
International, "Cuba demands an end to the isolation and hounding of
Arafat."
Castro's mouthpiece refers to "the genocidal actions of the Israeli
army" and its "bloody offensive against the Palestinian territories
and the headquarters of the Palestine National Authority."
In case Cuba's position on the Arab-Israeli conflict was unclear, Granma
clarifies: "Cuba reiterates its full support for the heroic struggle of the
Arab peoples, in particular that of the Palestinians, against Israeli occupation
and aggression, and declares its solidarity with their resistance and defiance."
When Israel launched Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982, to eliminate PLO
bases in southern Lebanon, the Cuban Embassy in Beirut was Arafat's
headquarters. Cuban advisers had been in the PLO bases since the late 1970s,
after Castro met with George Habash of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine.
In 1988, Cuba published "The Other Face: The Truth about the Secret
Relationships between Nazism and Zionism," by Mahmud Abbas (now secretary
general of the PLO's executive committee). Abbas disputes the number of Jews
murdered by the Nazis and argues that Zionists murdered more than the Nazis. The
book's cover connects the swastika with the Star of David.
Yasser Arafat visited Cuba in November 1974. It was a logical event given
Castro's deployment of thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks to aid Syrian
belligerence against Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He was awarded the
National Order of the Bay of Pigs during his visit. The Nov. 24, 1974, edition
of Granma features a photograph of Castro and Arafat smiling hand in hand.
Kantor quotes historian Robert M. Levine in "Tropical Diaspora: The
Jewish Experience in Cuba": "Anti-Israel and anti-Zionist
proclamations became routine, issued even in settings with nothing to do with
the Middle East."
Cuba has sponsored anti-Semitism elsewhere by disseminating books like "Zionism:
The Fascism of the Star of David" and "Symposium on Zionist
Interference in Latin America."
What David J. Kopilow wrote in "Castro, Israel, and the PLO"
(1985) remains true: "Cuba plays a leading role in the international
campaign against Israel."
Despite this overwhelming evidence of Cuba's blatant anti-Semitism, Kantor
charges that Jewish organizations in America ignore that demonstrated fact.
"The Anti-Defamation League recently released a report on
'Anti-Semitism in the Egyptian Media, February 2001-February 2002.'"
Cartoons in Egypt's state-sponsored newspapers equating Zionism with Nazism
certainly warrant condemnation; but why no report or press release on similar
vulgarity from the most anti-Zionist regime in the Western Hemisphere?"
Kantor asks.
Noting that the Anti-Defamation League at least doesn't glamorize the Cuban
regime that exalts the Arab brownshirts, Kantor reports that "The B'nai
B'rith and American ORT, on the other hand, respectively feature photographs of
Castro and the murderous Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, who considered Zionism
'reactionary.'
"Jews in Cuba must endure the daily demonization of the Jewish
homeland, but Jewish organizations in America can speak out. The silence of the
oppressed is understandable. The silence of the free is not," Kantor
concludes. | 
