http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/12516/french_jewish_leader_radical_islamism_is_similar_to_nazism Richard Prasquier: Radical Islamism and Nazism Following a worrying rise of anti-Semitism and terrorist threats against Jews in France, the president of the French Jewish community umbrella organization CRIF, Richard Prasquier, has drawn a parallel between what he termed ‘radical Islamism’ and Nazism. In an op-ed published in the French newspaper ‘Le Monde’, Prasquier […]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/libya-attack-cia-discovery-us-consulate-killings_n_1984429.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D222984 WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington within 24 hours of last month’s deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate that there was evidence it was carried out by militants, not a spontaneous mob upset about an American-made video ridiculing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, U.S. officials have told The Associated Press. […]
Publ. Chicago Jewish Star October 17, 2012.
Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, by Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff (Washington: Wyman Institute, 2012).Millions of Jews to Rescue, by Samuel Merlin (Washington: Wyman Institute, 2012).
One of my earliest childhood memories is politically tainted. In November 1944, when I was not yet eight, my father assigned me to distribute “Vote for FDR” leaflets near (probably illegally near) a Brooklyn polling station. It was not a task that required courage. In my Brownsville neighborhood, it would have been easier to find a Jew who ate pork than one who would begrudge Roosevelt a fourth term as president in favor of Republican Thomas Dewey. Every segment of American Jewry embraced Roosevelt. From right to left, east European to German, working class to middle class, Jews adored the Commander in Chief of the war against Hitler. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the most important American Jewish leader of the time, said that American Jews “rightly look up to [FDR], revere him, and love him…No one would more deeply sorrow than I…if this feeling of Jewish homage…should be changed.” Wise sycophantically (Jeremiah might have said, idolatrously) referred to FDR as “the All Highest.”
Yet the record of his administration with regard to the plight of European Jews being hunted and murdered by Nazism was shameful. Wise himself wrote to a colleague in 1933 that “FDR has not lifted a finger on behalf of the Jews of Germany.” Indeed, ever since the publication of David Wyman’s Paper Walls and Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue, it has been common knowledge that although the U.S. under FDR admitted more Jewish refugees than other Western nations between 1933 and 1945 its record was actually worse than theirs. “American ability to absorb immigration,” Wyman wrote, “was vastly greater than that of the small European countries …Viewed in relation to capacity, the English, Dutch, French and others …were more generous than the United States.”
The whole tangled question of the abandonment of European Jewry by Roosevelt’s administration and American Jewish leadership is the subject of two new books by the founding director of the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Rafael Medoff, one of the most meticulous and imaginative historians of his generation. In Herbert Hoover and the Jews, Medoff and co-author Sonja Wentling demonstrate that it was Hoover (as little liked by Jews as Dewey) who “urged opening America’s doors to Jewish refugee children, and Roosevelt who kept those doors closed “; it was Hoover who during the Holocaust years “repeatedly spoke out for the Jews, while Roosevelt repeatedly turned away.” Among Hoover’s efforts on behalf of the hunted European Jews was his public support (as honorary chairman) of the Bergson Group’s Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe in July 1943. Millions of Jews to Rescue is the detailed story (edited, annotated, and illustrated by Medoff) of the desperate Bergson campaign, as told by Samuel Merlin, one of its leaders.
Taken together, the two books require crucial revisions of the accepted view of Roosevelt’s culpability for the Jewish catastrophe, of the internecine warfare between rival American-Jewish organizations, of the limits and still unrealized possibilities of Jews’ relationship to the Republican Party
The usual rationalization offered by FDR’s apologists for his unwillingness to admit Jewish refugees to this country, or to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz has been that, in the first instance, he was stymied by antisemites entrenched in the State Department, or that, in the second, winning the war against Nazism was the best way to rescue European Jewry. It was not, they claim, FDR’s fault that by the time the war was won, there were relatively few Jews left to be rescued. But the documentary evidence adduced by Medoff suggests darker explanations.
Two examples should suffice. In the Roosevelt Papers one finds the following “Memorandum for the President’s Files” on The Casablanca Conference of January 1943:
“The President stated that … the whole Jewish problem should be studied very carefully and that progress should be definitely planned … the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions…should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population….The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.” Or this, from the Diaries of Henry Morgenthau , Jan. 27, 1942: “Then Leo [Crowley] said that for no apparent reason whatsoever the President proceeded to give him the following lecture. ‘Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance…It is up to both of you [Crowley and Morgenthau] to go along with anything that I want at this time.’”
Jewish-Arab Demography Defies Conventional “Wisdom” Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought” “Israel Hayom”, October 19, 2012, http://bit.ly/TBkiJH Jewish majority west of the Jordan River is secure, benefitting from a tailwind in defiance of conventional “wisdom,” which once again is detached from reality. In 2012, Israel’s Jewish demography continues the robust surge of the last 17 […]
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=288452 Israel aside, the unquestioning, almost Pavlovian, support US Jews give Obama is inconsistent with their values and incompatible with their welfare. What liberals believe needs to be changed or discarded — and apologized for to other nations — is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating and proudly defending against attack. American Jewry […]
Jan Poller: Why did Candy Crowley have the transcript of a President Obama speech? How did Obama know that she had it? Video of President Obama asking Crowley to look at the transcript Collusion! Collusion is the only explanation even though Ms. Crowley said she had the transcript in anticipation of the question. That doesn’t […]
THANKS TO JANET LEVY:
This 20 minute video produced by the Seals explains the serious consequences of Obama’s public disclosures of tactics, his exposure of personnel, his politicizing of operations and his use of the OBL kill for self aggrandizement and personal gain.
Well worth the time.
http://nation.foxnews.com/navy-seals/2012/08/16/navy-seals-respond-after-media-matters-calls-them-gutless
Another Tack: Felicitations for banana-unbenders The European Union was never popular in Israel and with good reason. Its officious meddling has already well exceeded the bounds of commonplace harassment and has edged ever closer to an infringement on our sovereignty, a suborning of our democracy and the undermining of our vital self-preservation interests. So despite […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2720 Palestinian ‘democracy’ in action As Americans begin the countdown to Nov. 6, and Israelis prepare to vote for the next Knesset on Jan. 22, the Palestinians are heading to the polls on Saturday to cast their ballots in the first municipal elections since 2005. These elections, for local leadership in Judea and Samaria (the […]
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2280/The-Jihad-and-Christopher-Stevens-Pt-2.aspx To attempt to understand Christopher Stevens’ long-standing interest in ben Qumu, the al Qaeda terrorist suspected of leading the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012 in which Stevens and three other Americans were murdered, we must seek context in more of Stevens’ cables. (Thanks be to Wikileaks.) On February 15, 2008, Stevens wrote a […]
