Introduction to The Antizionist Complex by Daniel Patrick Moynihan

During the 1970’s, an especially blatant and vulgar brand of anti-Semitism became a unifying global ideology of the totalitarian Left. Couched in the language of opposition to Zionism, this anti-Semitism became the preferred vehicle of the Soviet Union and its clients in international forums for political assaults against the democratic nations—most obviously Israel, but ultimately all the West, and especially the United States.
“Anti-Zionism” was promoted by an intense propaganda campaign the Soviet Union had launched early in the decade, a campaign embraced and amplified by lesser radical regimes also hostile to the democratic West and equally anxious to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel. The Soviets had developed for this purpose a peculiar variant of Marxist analysis, arguing throughout the Third World that “imperialism”, the supposed enemy of the new states, was in effect the creation of an international Zionist conspiracy. The clear implication was that Jews somehow played a special role in perpetuating the alleged injustices of international capitalism.
The connection was first made, according to Bernard Lewis, at the very dawn of the 1970’s:
In a statement released to the press on March 4, 1970, a ‘group of Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality’—making use of the facilities of the Soviet Foreign Ministry—attacked ‘the aggression of the Israeli ruling circles/ and said that ‘Zionism has always expressed the chauvinistic view and racist ravings of the Jewish bourgeoisie.’
The notion was steadily elaborated and diffused in Soviet culture to the point where the October 10, 1980 issue of Pionerskaya Pravda, a tabloid-type weekly magazine for children aged nine to fourteen belonging to the Soviet youth organization, Pioneers, could run a feature that said:
Zionists try to penetrate all spheres of public life, as well as ideology, science, and trade. Even Levi jeans contribute to their operations: the revenues obtained from the sale of these pants are used by the firm to help the Zionists.
Most of the largest monopolies in the manufacture of arms are controlled by Jewish bankers. Business made on blood brings them enormous profits. Bombs and missiles explode in Lebanon—the bankers Lazars and the Leibs are making money. Thugs in Afghanistan torment schoolchildren with gases—the bundles of dollars are multiplying in the safes of the Lehmans and Guggenheims. It is clear that Zionism’s principal enemy is peace on earth.
Predictably, this he soon began to compel the Soviets abroad as well as at home. A steady stream of denunciations of Israel—frequently for embodying the Zionism the Soviets and their agents succeeded in labeling racism—came to be adopted at international conferences and meetings. The height of the campaign, though not nearly its end, came on November 10, 1975, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the infamous Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. This marked a watershed in Soviet-inspired anti-Semitism; all that came later would build explicitly on this.
I tried to make this point at the time. I was then the Permanent Representative of the United States at the United Nations and I rose after the vote to say:
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 so, indeed, it went.
In 1978, Cuba, long a party to the campaign, became head of the “Movement of Non-Aligned Nations”. Not coincidently, the next summit of heads of state and government of the Movement, convened at Havana between September 3 and 7, 1979, adopted a resolution affirming that
racism, including zionism (sic), racial discrimination, and especially apartheid, constituted crimes against humanity and represented violations of the
United Nations Charter and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It had become a crime to be a Jew who wished to return to the Jewish national homeland.
The only consolation, one could say, was that at least this had been voted in a forum where the United States and its principal allies were not represented, and so could not reasonably expect to sway the vote in favor of the legitimacy of a kindred democracy.
Yet, surprisingly, alarmingly, by the second half of the decade, the United States had already begun to abdicate responsibility in this regard, even in those arenas where it could influence the outcome.
Thus, on March 1, 1980, the U.S. voted in favor of a UN Security Council Resolution that found Israel to be in “flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention”—making it the first nation in history to be found guilty of violating the covenant that made illegal under international law the behavior of Nazi Germany.
Though this vote would later be disavowed, unconvincingly, by officials of the Carter Administration, the American willingness to acquiesce in Soviet-inspired attacks on Israel had been demonstrated. It would be confirmed on December 15, 1980 in the General Assembly when the U.S. abstained on a similar resolution reasserting Israeli violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The irony and the tragedy is that, throughout, the Soviet campaign against Israel has been directed ultimately at the United States and the liberal democratic values on which it is founded. The adoption, by 1980, of a position of almost total American acquiesence in the campaign against Israel has done nothing so much as set the stage for subsequent attacks on the United States.
First they would attack Israel; then the United States, for its support of Israel, finally, the language of international politics would be directed against the United States itself. 
Thus, the Non-Aligned Countries would issue a communique, following a meeting of Foreign Ministers and Heads of UN Delegations in New York on September 25th and 28th, 1981, replete—in the words of Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick—with “base lies and malicious attacks on the good name of the United States.” It described an incident of August 19, 1981, wherein American planes above the Gulf of Sidra were attacked by Libyan fighters, as “aggression by the United States” and “a threat to international peace and security”.
I brought the document to the attention of the U.S. Senate on October 14, saying:
The United States cannot afford not to see the consequences of the language of politics in the world being turned against us. There is a real issue of language here, and this is totalitarian language.
This language says, when you defend yourself against attack, you are declared to have been an aggressor. That is a standard Orwellian inversion of meaning. When you attempt to resist the aggression of others, you are said to be the aggressor.
Likewise there are no Libyan troops in Chad. There are no Soviet troops in Angola. There is only American aggression in the Gulf of Sidra.
The issues here are transcendent. They go beyond the events of the moment. They go to this question: Does the language of politics become that of totalitarian powers? Does its purpose become what we encountered at the beginning of the 1920’s to pervert meaning, to reverse meaning, to corrupt meaning, to make the language inaccessible save to those who understand the code?
This is what comes of ignoring, or rationalizing, anti-Semitic propaganda and anti-Zionist attacks on Israel in international forums. Language is perverted to serve the purposes of freedom’s enemies. This is where we are today.
As I wrote in an article for The New Leader in November 1979,
It would be tempting to see in this propaganda nothing more than bigotry of a quite traditional sort that can, sooner or later, be overcome. But the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist campaign is not uninformed bigotry, it is conscious politics. We are dealing here not with the primitive but with the sophisticated, with the world’s most powerful propaganda apparatus—that of the Soviet Union and the dozens of governments which echo it. Further, this fact of world politics creates altogether new problems for those interested in the fate of democracies in the world, and of Israel in the Middle East. It is not merely that our adversaries have commenced an effort to destroy the legitimacy of a kindred democracy through the incessant repetition of the Zionist-racist lie. It is that others can come to believe it also. Americans among them.
Americans need to be better informed about the totalitarian threat, and the manner in which anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism contribute to it. And therein lies the reason for this English edition of The Anti-Zionist Complex: to enlighten Americans to the real nature, and the purposes, of the Soviet-sponsored anti- Zionist campaign. An outstandingly thorough work of original scholarship, Jacques Givet’s analysis will become a standard reference on this most important of subjects.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Washington, DC December 15, 1981