Go to the website of the American Library Association, an organization with more than sixty-six thousand members in the United States and elsewhere. Follow the links to the ALA’s so-called ‘Social Responsibilities Round Table’ the SRRT. Continue following the internal links from there to the SRRT’s misnamed International Responsibilities Task Force, and then go to a copious listing of ‘alternative’ literature. You will now be able to choose from a smorgasbord of articles calling for the annihilation of Israel.
If there exists even one pro-Israel article linked from the American Library Association’s website, I could not find it, despite laboriously repeated search attempts. Not a single one.
To be sure, the overwhelming majority of the ALA’s membership does not seek the Jewish state’s obliteration. But a hardcore group of haters, especially within the ALA-SRRT, works with obsessive determination to bring that about. And these Israel-bashers have been pushing their agenda since the mid-1980’s.
Sometimes resisting, but more often caving in to the will of the haters, the ALA Council has passed a horrendous series of edicts which in turn are distributed to the PLO, the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, foreign governments, and other national and international entities in order to maximize the harm to Israel.
And those on the ALA Council who have voted for the anti-Israel resolutions have done so knowing full well that for the haters egging them on with such fervor, the issue is really not what Israel does or does not do. It is Israel’s very existence itself that they object to.
The American Library Association has condemned no other nation with anywhere near the frequency and vitriol it has reserved for Israel. Indeed, there would have been even more condemnations of Israel were it not for the fact that for several years now the ALA Council has had a problem obtaining voting quorums.
But the bigots may have overcome that obstacle to their mischief. Last June they succeeded in getting the Council to establish a quorum, still to be approved by the entire ALA, which cuts in half the number of members needed to pass resolutions.
A pro-Israel librarian, whose name it is safer to keep anonymous, characterized the ALA’s latest foray into anti-Israel, pro-Arafat advocacy as ”hogwash,” but then added that because of the move to lower quorums, ”I am personally more pessimistic on our chances of overturning this mess, though we need to keep our voices heard…”
Some of the condemnations of Israel are displayed on the SRRT-International Responsibilities Task Force portion of the ALA website, including a 1992 Council resolution that was revoked the following year; a 1998 SRRT-sponsored resolution that the Council rejected; and last June’s condemnations of Israel for purportedly destroying ”Palestinian libraries, archives and other cultural institutions.
The latter alleged destruction, distinct SRRT and ALA Council resolutions assert, ”…represents a significant loss for the Palestinian people and the world.”
Can it be that the ALA people are unaware of the vile and blatant anti-Semitism — including Holocaust denial and calls for genocide, ethnic cleansing and jihad against Jews — that prevails in Palestinian ”libraries, archives and cultural institutions”?
Doctors Against Child Sacrifice (DOCS), an organization composed of about three hundred pediatricians, has cogently described the literature directed at young people in areas ruled by Arafat’s criminals as a ”form of societal child abuse.”
Interestingly, the text of one of two anti-Israel resolutions, passed in 1992, is conspicuously absent from the ALA website. Apparently that one — which never was rescinded — has proved a bit too embarrassing, even for seasoned Israel bashers.
The malicious document said, in part: ”Resolved, the American Library Association protests the deportation of Omar al-Safi…a librarian at Bir Zeit University in the Israeli-Occupied West Bank.” It also referred to al-Safi as ”our colleague.”
