WAS CHILE'S ALLENDE ANTI-SEMITIC?

Was Allende anti-Semitic?
A new book on Chilean President Salvador Allende is causing a stir by suggesting that this icon of the left -- who killed himself during a 1973 putsch -- was racist and anti-Semitic. (Der Spiegel)

SEE ALSO: Salvador Allende's Secret
By Hannah Cleaver

Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile who was killed during a CIA-backed coup in 1973, was an anti-Semite who held fascist ideas in his youth about race and crime, it is claimed in a book which has split Chile. The book, Salvador Allende: Antisemitism and Euthanasia, will shock many who still revere him as a martyr who was deposed by the right-wing Gen Augusto Pinochet, with the backing of Washington and big business.

The disclosures come from Allende's 1933 doctoral dissertation which has been kept secret until now. In it he asserted that Jews had a disposition to crime and called for compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and alcoholics.

Allende also wrote: "The Hebrews are characterized by certain types of crime: fraud, deceit, slander and above all usury. These facts permits the supposition that race plays a role in crime."

Among the Arabs, he wrote, were some industrious tribes but "most are adventurers, thoughtless and lazy with a tendency to theft".