Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

September 5, 2019

Before Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, There Was Paul Findley

Yasir Arafat’s anti-Semitic “best friend in Congress.”

Last month, the former Illinois congressman Paul Findley died at the age of ninety-eight. For most of his 22-year career in the House of Representatives, he remained uninvolved in foreign policy, but in the late 1970s he paid a visit to South Yemen, during which he met some officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He thereafter developed a reputation, which he himself embraced, as Yasir Arafat’s “best friend in Congress”—singularly focused on exposing the imagined evils of Israel. Jonathan Schanzer elaborates:

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