Concern over the spread of anti-Semitic literature in various countries was expressed here today at the Assembly of the World Jewish Congress, where it was reported that “a considerable international commerce in anti-Jewish literature has developed in the last few years.”
While this report was under discussion, anti-Jewish literature originating with the notorious Swedish anti-Semite Einar Aberg was distributed in the building where the WJC Assembly is being held. Aberg has also intensified the distribution of his anti-Jewish leaflets and pamphlets throughout Sweden during the period of the Assembly.
The more than 300 delegates from 40 lands attending the Assembly were greatly interested in a report presented at today’s session on Arab-subsidized anti-Jewish propaganda conducted in Latin America. Dr. Abraham Schwartz, of Uruguay, told the delegates that diplomatic representatives of the United Arab Republic, who have substantial funds at their disposal, are organizing press conferences in Latin American countries and are issuing free tickets to Latin American journalists to visit Egypt.
The Latin American journalists, Dr. Schwartz reported, are being taken on conducted tours through the Palestine Arab refugee camps, with the result that they return home and write articles in their newspapers destined to create anti-Jewish feelings. Dr. Schwartz emphasized that there was no open anti-Semitism in Latin American lands, but that Jews there felt endangered because of the prevailing economic conditions.
ANTI-SEMITES DISTRIBUTE ANTI-JEWISH MATERIAL ON INTERNATIONAL SCALE
Reviewing the work of anti-Semitic groups who concentrate on distribution of anti-Jewish literature in various countries, the World Jewish Congress executive said in its report to the Assembly: “This material consists of periodicals, pamphlets and other printed matter in various languages which reproduce the grossest anti-Jewish attacks of the Nazi era, and are quite evidently intended to foment the crudest anti-Jewish prejudice in the areas to which they are dispatched.”
There was evidence, the report went on, “that anti-Semitic organizations, institutions or individual adventures in this field have established inter-locking international relationships in order to facilitate the dissemination of racist material on an international scale.”
Australia had been regularly supplied with such material from the United States and the United Kingdom. From Australia anti-Semitic literature had turned up in Turkey, while “from Sweden there has come a ceaseless stream of anti-Semitic material ostensibly produced and distributed by a single individual, Einar Aberg, which has turned up in Germany, South Africa and various Latin American States, all areas carefully chosen because for historical reasons this material might make an impact.”
Governments had invariably received World Jewish Congress representations on such literature with “the utmost sympathy,” the report stated. The Swedish authorities, who had secured the enactment of legislation designed to curb the export of racist material “prosecuted and secured the condemnation of one of the most notorious exporters of this material. But it is illustrative of the wide ramifications and connections of the international anti-Semitic movement that our communication to the Swedish authorities, urging that action should be taken against this agitator, was subsequently reproduced in various languages in anti-Semitic periodicals in the United States and South Africa.”
Admitting the difficulties in negotiating an international convention to deal with this problem, the World Jewish Congress experts had consistently urged on the appropriate United Nations bodies “the desirability of studying the possibility of formulating an international convention which without in any way calling into question the principle of the freedom of speech, would enable governments to cooperate in protecting the rights and security of those threatened by such propaganda from abroad,” the report stated.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
