Getting Their Act Together

Among the worst criminals responsible for the Holocaust were not those German leaders convicted at Nuremberg, but Jewish ones condemned by indisputable historical evidence.

Born in 1938, it was at a very early age that I overheard my family sadly bemoaning in Yiddish the mass slaughter of our people, gleaned from the front pages of the Yiddish press and radio. Unfortunately the more educated and assimilated Jews who depended on the Jewish-owned NY Times’ version of events were less informed than this Yiddish speaking preschooler. With the exception of those who bravely ventured past the Times crossword puzzle and were sharp-eyed enough to locate vague and abridged articles relating to the mass slaughter, the majority were left ignorant.

FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull was an abysmal anti-Semite, as well as were many of his henchmen. While some well-know historians find this difficult to prove, the functioning of his State Department would make it impossible to disprove. By superimposing a strict regime of sand bagging, stonewalling, elusiveness, evasiveness, and outright circumvention of federal law on an already inefficient  bureaucracy he insured that the barest minimum of Jewish asylum seekers reached our shores (please compare this policy to the admittance of hordes of so-called anti-communist East European “activists” e.g.: SS legionnaires and Einsatzgruppen executioners admitted for years after the war.) Hull’s overriding concern was not that the Jews would perish in Poland but that they would eventually live in the United States. The reason that he and the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, never made overtures to Hitler’s government for the possible transfer of his unwanted despoiled Jews was not because of the certainty of its rejection, but the terrifying uncertainty of its possible acceptance.

Unfortunately with all this, the most galling and despicable chapter of this horrendous tragedy was written by some of the leaders of major Jewish organizations. Because some, like Rabbi Stephen Wise, had easy access to the president’s ear, they misinterpreted meaningless and misleading generalities coming from his mouth as the administrations promise of forthcoming support. Thus, they deluded themselves into assuming their actions should conform with that of the government, and any outside action by an independent group sidetracked, and sidetrack they did.  They thus became a tool of the administration and they diverted their resources and energy to subvert the Bergsonites (an organization led by Peter Bergson originally to raise money to supply arms to the Irgun and to finance moving refugees to Palestine which shifted its emphasis when the news of the systematic annihilation became known) who were demanding immediate administration and UN action while there were still Jewish communities to save.

They mounted mass rallies and staged a magnificent pageant that toured the country, attracting record breaking audiences. They even put pressure on the administration by directly approaching members of Congress.  Sadly, of the seven Jewish members of Congress, only one was deeply involved with the rescue effort, one was a devoted stooge of the administration and the other five couldn’t be relied on.  It was the gentile members of Congress that outshone their pragmatic Hebrew colleagues. Something resembling the dismal showing of the Jewish members of Congress during the vote on the Iran deal.

The Bergsonites were also encroaching on the established Jewish organization’s turf. So instead of a Bergsonite inspired rescue plan these organizations unwittingly helped Hull hem and haw until there was almost nobody to save.  Because of this these organizations didn’t save one Jewish community, and ensured that this President and Secretary of State didn’t drop one bomb on Auschwitz.

And what do we have now?  A state department that was complicit in the decimation of Europe’s Yiddish speaking communities blatantly trying to undermine the world’s only Hebrew speaking one; and a president openly hostile to Israel who would do more damage if it wasn’t for a friendly Congress. As for some of the major Jewish organizations their actions can only be described as bizarrely dysfunctional. The latest and most absurd was brought to my attention by HIAS’ ad signed by over 1000 rabbis for a campaign to assist Syrian refugees. HIAS is funded by the UJA. In my telephone conversations with these agencies I made the following points:

• In Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Germany and Austria after WWII were not only Jewish survivors of the Holocaust but thousands of Germans, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and turncoat Russian Nazi collaborators fleeing retribution by the Red Army, and detection by the Western Allies. They were the ones that physically carried out the Holocaust. They brought their anti-Semitism with them, so the Jews had to be put in separate camps for their own safety. But officially they were also refugees, so why didn’t HIAS also help them resettle here?
• Please note that the German public was only bombarded by anti-Semitic invective from 1933-1945, the Syrian public was for 8 decades. There are no Syrian Hebrew refugees now because they had to flee their Arab neighbors hate long before the Syrian civil war. I witnessed the product of this hate when I was an Israeli soldier and saw the tortured bodies of Israeli prisoners recovered from the Golan Heights. Their brutality was familiar to the Israelis long before it was proven daily to the world by videos of what they are doing to each other.
• And these are the people HIAS wants to aid?
• And this is the agency the UJA funds?

As for the thousand rabbis signing onto the ad; a close look will discover a large group of anti-Israel activists, including the “original cast” of Fasting for Gaza who supported Hamas while Israel was being bombarded by rockets. Let’s not forget the few employees of the Jewish Federation who take Jewish money with one hand and help Arab organizations with the other. What constitutes a conflict of interest? What disqualifies somebody from getting or keeping a job there?

Please note that all of this is happening when Jews are being killed on a daily basis in their own homes and in their own country.  To achieve one holocaust Hitler used Jewish operatives.  Eichmann at his trial stated, “the Nazis regarded Jewish cooperation as the cornerstone of their Jewish policy.”  The Jews he was referring to were people acting under extreme duress. The ones I am criticizing are suffering from politically correct extreme left-wing-inspired self-hate. To them and the organizations they belong to, I use a phrase I learned while I was in the US Navy — shape up or ship out. I also would use a phrase often heard while I was in the Israeli Army.  However it is unprintable.

I am still waiting for factual replies from HIAS and the UJA Federation.