A dangerous place

by Daniel P. Moynihan

"For eight months in 1975 and 1976, Danial Patrick Moynihan served the Unites States as its Ambassador to the United Nations. During a term of almost unprecedented controversy, editorial debate, and front-page headlines, he alerted both his country and the international forum of new forms of assault upon the democratic idea of human rights, which a new majority in the United Nations was trying to distort and which the developed democracies of the West were unwilling to defend. At issue were the principles that underlie all political freedom and are basic to the United Nations itself. By 1975 Soviet aims and Arab money had stirred up a movement to undermine the legitimacy of the state of Israel by equating (in defiance of history, logic, and language) Zionism with racism. Moynihan battled this lie in the field of ideas and on the floor of the U.N., and the eloquent fight he waged may have proved to be one of the turning points in the history of the United Nations and of U.S. foreign pol