Anti-Communist Rally

The Arab world rallied last week behind Gamal Abdel Nasser in his defiance of Communist attacks and joined heartily in his counterblasts, all set off when the Kremlin's propagandists ventured to criticize Nasser's stern repression of Egyptian Communists (TIME, June 16). Said Saudi Arabia Foreign Minister Ibrahim Sowail: "We will not abide Soviet attacks on any Arab country and least of all on the U.A.R., our biggest sister." Top officials in Yemen, Morocco and Lebanon took the Soviets to task for being "unfair" to an Arab neighbor. Arab propagandists took up the cudgels in their own fashion. "Communism," the Baghdad daily Al-Fajr al-Jadid explained to its readers, "is to all intents and purposes a Jewish concept." READ ABOUT THE PART PLAYED BY THE ISRAELI COMMUNIST PARTY IN GUIDING THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF IRAQ, blared a hot-selling pamphlet in Cairo, obviously subsidized by the government at 8-c- a copy.

But the most important voice backing Nasser came from Iraq's Major General Abdul Karim Kassem, who, like Nasser, has accepted lavish Soviet aid. Premier Kassem last week fired the entire executive committee of the Iraq Press Association on the vague ground that they were "serving Communism and deriving their inspiration exclusively from Sputniks." Taking over as the new press-association president, pro-Nasser Publisher Al Haj Taha al Fayez rapped out an angry editorial in his daily Al-Fajr al-Jadid: "The sun of the Communists has set. The Communist countries are falling to bits through starvation and ruination."

Russia, which unlike the U.S. still expects to see concrete results from concrete aid, seemed baffled by the storm its criticism of Nasser had set off. The Soviet propaganda machine muted its tone about Nasser and had not a word to say about other Arab voices raised in his support.

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