The Toronto Globe and Mail charged editorially today that there were “anti-Semitic inclinations” in an election speech by a Social Credit Party candidate last week, and called on the party’s leader to “disown” the candidate immediately. Unless he does so, the paper said, “the public will be entitled to conclude that the Socreds are willing to harbor men of such unpleasant opinions within their ranks.”
The candidate, Neil Carmichael, contesting the St. Paul’s riding, told an audience there last week that the Rothschild family was trying to buy up all the Canadian mines it could and was working through a non-Jewish agent. The Rothschilds,he asserted, were part of an international circle of financiers attempting to get control of all Canadian business.
“Mr. Carinichael did not take an openly anti-Semitic line, ” the paper said, “but the tone of his remarks suggested that Jewish international financiers were somehow working against the interests of the Canadian people. He said that the Rothschild family were trying to buy all the Canadian mines they could and, by adding that they were working through a non-Jewish agent, implied that this was in the nature of a conspiracy.”
The editorial added that “this sort of talk is more absurd than objectionable, but it comes very close to the familiar anti-Semitic propaganda dealing with Jewish financiers and their alleged machinations to enslave the world.”
Robert Day, president of the Young Social Credit Association of Ontario, said he found “Mr. Carmichael’s anti-Semitism thoroughly distasteful” and declared he would resign from that post unless Mr. Carmichael gave up his candidacy, A Social Credit Party spokesman said that Robert Thompson, the party’s national leader, had asked for an investigation of the speech.
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.
