Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 18, 1990 TAG: 9004180090
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler called their views abhorrent and said one purpose of the tour, paid for by the U.S. Information Agency, was to educate the writers about "how the United States works as a multiethnic society based on individual freedoms.
"Bringing them here does not signal that we approve or sanction their views," Tutwiler added.
The tour prompted a complaint from the American Jewish Committee.
David Harris, director of its Washington office, said, "We are giving the group undue exposure by bringing them to the United States at American taxpayer expense. And I am concerned we are dignifying and legitimizing this group, which can only strengthen their hand when they return to the U.S.S.R."
A Russian Jewish emigre whose studies of anti-Semitic writers were used by the committee, Semyon Reznick, said some writers in the group "exuded the myth of a Jewish-Zionist conspiracy, an old Russian hatred" in their work.
Frank Johnson Jr., a spokesman for the U.S. Information Agency, said, "I don't know that they are anti-Semitic; I don't know that they are not, either. We feel very strongly that pluralism in this country is worth talking about and observing."
But Tutwiler, asked if some of the Russians might have anti-Semitic views, replied: "My understanding is that some of the people do hold those views. But our opinion, as you know, is that we bring all types of groups here, and it is not a sanction or endorsement of those views, at all."
She said Secretary of State James Baker had raised the issue of growing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in their last two rounds of meetings.
Emigre Reznick singled out Stanislav Kunyaev as a "big fish" of anti-Semitic writers in the group.
As editor of Nash Sovremenik (Our Contemporary), Kunyaev wrote an article praising the long-discredited "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as "written by very clever people who understand the history of mankind."
The protocols purport to be an account of a meeting of Jewish leaders plotting to control the world. Adolf Hitler in Germany and Czarist rulers in Russia used the fictitious documents to stir up anti-Jewish sentiments to murderous levels.
Johnson of the USIA said the writers were selected by public affairs and cultural affairs officers of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow who were seeking to bring conservative Russian nationalists to the United States.
by CNB