4 Friday, April 4, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS THE JEWISH NEWS Serving Detroit's Metropolitan Jewish Community with distinction for four decades. Editorial and Sales offices at 20300 Civic Center Dr., Suite 240, Southfield, Michigan 48076-4138 Telephone (313) 354 6060 OP-ED Our Wonderful 'Friends' In Troubled Kingdom Of Oil - PUBLISHER: Charles A. Buerger EDITOR EMERITUS: Philip Slomovitz EDITOR: Gary Rosenblatt CONSULTANT: Carmi M. Slomovitz ART DIRECTOR: Kim Muller-Thym NEWS EDITOR: Alan Hitsky LOCAL NEWS EDITOR: Heidi Press LOCAL COLUMNIST: Danny Raskin OFFICE STAFF: Lynn Fields Marlene Miller Dharlene Norris Phyllis Tyner Pauline Weiss Ellen Wolfe ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES: Lauri Biafore Allan Craig Rick Nessel Danny Raskin PRODUCTION: Donald Cheshure Cathy Ciccone Curtis Deloye Ralph Orme ©1986 by The Detroit Jewish News (US PS 275-520) Second Class postage paid at Southfield, Michigan and additional mailing offices. Subscriptions: 1 year - $21 — 2 years - $39 — Out of State - $23 — Foreign - $35 CANDLELIGHTING AT 6:43 P.M. VOL. LXXXIX, NO. 6 The Waldheim Record The charges keep coming and Kurt Waldheim keeps denying them. The former Secretary General of the United Nations, who is running for President of Austria, has insisted for four decades that he was never a Nazi. His official biographies and his own recent memoirs say that after being wounded while serving as a conscript on the Eastern front in 1941, he returned to Vienna to study for a law degree. It now turns out that he joined a Nazi student union in April, 1938, joined the Brownshirts on November 18 of that year, nine days after Kristallnacht, and served in the Balkans in 1942 and 1943 on the staff of a general who was later executed for war crimes. Waldheim now contends that he served only as an interpreter, but in any event his services earned him a decoration from the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia. If there is nothing to his background to be ashamed of, why did Mr. Waldheim go to such lengths to cover up his past? He is now saying that the charges being made by the World Jewish Congress are a political ploy to hurt him in the upcoming Austrian election. "For 40 years nobody cared about all this," Waldheim told an interviewer recently. "And now, because I am running for the Presidency of Austria, suddenly somebody digs in and produces accusations which are completely untrue ... The timing of it is perfect. For 40 years these things have rested." Isn't that the point, though? No one is accusing Waldheim of war crimes. But a man who consistently assured the public that he never belonged to any Nazi organization, that indeed he opposed them, has retreated to the position that he never knew of any atrocities. The evidence emerging in newly uncovered documents from German and Yugoslav archives, including photos of Waldheim with German and Italian officers, indicates that he was an intelligence officer. Those at the United Nations expressing shock that the man who led the organization for a decade was at best a liar should re-consider. After all, it is only fitting for such a man to head a morally bankrupt world body. The lesson here is that the truth will out. Even if, as Kurt Waldheim says, "for 40 years these things have rested." It Did Happen Here It was incredibly easy. The electorate was uninformed and apathetic, the political establishment was complacent, the press was looking the other way. And so the bland-looking, quiet-talking candidates of the radical right ran for election in the primaries and got in. They, not the candidates with the foreign-sounding or Jewish names, were voted onto the ballot by an ignorant and only mildly anti-Semitic populace who turned out to do its duty as citizens half-heartedly and in small numbers. The conservatives were well-funded, highly organized and wonderfully energetic. What they did not spend on campaigning, they made up for in aggressive electioneering. Scary? A scenario from the last days of the Weimar Republic? No, Chicago two weeks ago, when Lyndon LaRouche's candidates slipped easily onto the Democratic ticket. And suddenly, bringing with them the loathsome baggage of neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism and political paranoia, the lunatic fringe was there, climbing the rungs to the seats of power. Scary? You bet. We have been warned. It happened here, in the United States, in Chicago. Given the right conditions, it could happen anywhere, even in Detroit. EZEKIEL LEIKIN Special to The Jewish News President Reagan has struck a mighty blow for freedom and democ- racy. In a recent statement, the Ad- ministration has committed the U.S. toward the furtherance of "demo- cratic revolution," which political observers viewed as a "significant force for international human rights." To counter the notion previously articulated by UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had drawn a distinction between "friendly authoritarians" and "hostile totalita- rians," the newly-unveiled position paper stipulates that the U.S. is op- posed to all dictatorships — on the right or left — and will henceforth gauge each country's conduct on the basis of its score-card on human rights. Thus, academic and political think-tanks will be, undoubtedly kept busy monitoring America's "democratic revolution" and its ap- plication to U.S. foreign policy. One question likely to tax the resourcefulness of Administration spokesmen is whether the "demo- cratic revolution" is relevant to Mideast despots, especially those labelled "friends of the U.S." It seems patently clear, that what distinguishes Saudi Arabia's King Fand from the deposed Fer- dinand Marcos and Jean-Claude Duvalier is the towering fact that the Saudi monarch is sitting on top of the world's largest reservoir of oil, which in terms of "real politik" out- . weighs such extraneous considera- tions as freedom and human rights. As former U.S. representative at the UN (now Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan phrased it, even frowning at "friendly" despots like King Fand Ezekiel Leikin is a writer and lecturer, and executive vice president of the Zionist Organization of America - Detroit District. is a "luxury" the U.S. can ill afford. Hence, Saudi Arabia has been kept "off limits" to U.S. strictures, al- though its credentials as a pro- American country have never been King Fand: The oily throne may be slipping. subjected to close scrutiny by U.S. policy-makers. Within a matter of weeks, the U.S. Congress will be called upon to buttress U.S. - Saudi friendship by approving the Administration's plan to provide the Saudis with $354 mil- lion worth of advanced American missiles. Clifford Hallam, who spent some time as a teacher in Saudi Arabia, offered a perceptive picture of Saudi society (Commentary, February 1986): "No one in Riyadh holds a brief for due process, open trials or a free press . . . judging from the ethos of Continued on Page 20