Peron Must Be Held Responsibie for Attacks on Jews in Argentina, N.Y. Times Demands

Calling attentionto the fact that the repeated anti-Jewish outbursts in Argentina resemble the pattern of the early days of the Naziregime in Germany, the New York Times, in an editorial today, says that Col. Peron, Argentina’s “strong man” must be held responsible for “attempting to make the Jewish question a part of his political program.” The editorial reads:

“Col. Juan D. Peron, the so-called strong man of the Colonels Government of Argentina, now has another crime for which some day he should be called to account by the Argentine people and the world. Sporadic anti-Jewish occurrences have now, under his political banner, reached the stage of mass action, with a raid by his followers into the Jewish section of Buenos Aires and attacks on Jewish citizens and Jewish-owned shops. All of this under the benevolent eye of the Buenos Aires police whom he controls. He cannot disclaim responsibility. Things like that just don’t happen.

“What a familiar pattern it is. What an apt pupil he is proving of the Nasi criminals who now stand in the prisoners’ dock at Nuremberg. With the great bulk of the Argentines openly arrayed against his candidacy for the Presidency and against everything for which he stands, he is attempting to raise the dangerous political issue of religion in a city and country where that issue hitherto has been dormant.

“It may have been a foreknowledge of these excesses on which Peron and his followers are now embarking that led Foreign Minister Rodriguez Larreta of near-by Uruguay to make his proposal for collective intervention by other countries of this Hemisphere when the Government of one of their number denies essential rights to its people or fails to fulfil its international obligations. It is a startling and potentially dangerous question that Senor Larreta raises, but certainly it is one that merits study.

“When the Nazis first began their pogroms in Germany, pogroms that developed into a war against all the rest of the world, it would have been comparatively easy to have stopped them then. The records being shown at the Nuremberg trials would have been found and the pretense that such actions were spontaneous outbursts quite effectively stripped away. But under our system of international law we had to wait until the end of the most terrible war in history, we had to wait until their racial and religious poisons had been spread throughout the world, before we could call them to account. Colonel Peron’s actions in attempting to make the Jewish question a part of his political program show to what lengths he is being forced by lack of support for his candidacy, But he is setting a fire that it may be difficult later to control.”