Tuesday, May 08, 2018

Rafael Medoff's Response to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's "Americans & the Holocaust"

(Republished by permission of the author)
U.S. HOLOCAUST MUSEUM TRIES TO RESCUE FDR

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C, recently opened a controversial new exhibit which claims that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did his best to help Jews during the Holocaust. The Washington Post described it as “a posthumous makeover for FDR at the museum.” 

Mainstream historians are challenging the museum’s revisionist approach. To explore these issues further, we present the essay “Walls of Paper,” by Dr. Rafael Medoff, which was published in the Spring 2018 issue of PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, published by the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education, at Yeshiva University. It is reprinted here by permission of the journal. For a full list of the footnotes from the essay, write to: info@wymaninstitute.org)

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and author or editor of 19 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest book is Too Little, and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America’s Response to the Holocaust.


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PART 1:  KEEPING THE JEWS OUT

“It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times,” wrote journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1938, “that for thousands and thousands of people, a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.” 
For over a century, the United States had an open-door immigration policy, welcoming newcomers from around the world in almost unlimited numbers. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, however, a number of prominent American anthropologists and eugenicists began promoting the idea that Anglo-Saxons were biologically superior to other peoples. This racialist view of society reshaped the public’s view of immigration in the years following World War I. 
The shift in attitudes took place at the same time that Americans were becoming increasingly anxious about Communism, as a result of the establishment of the Soviet Union. The combination of racism, fear of Communism, and general resentment of foreigners created strong public pressure to restrict immigration. 

CLOSING THE DOORS 

In 1921, Congress passed—and President Warren Harding signed into law—the Immigration Restriction Act. This legislation stipulated that the number of immigrants admitted annually from any single country could not exceed 3% of the number of immigrants from that country who had been living in the US at the time of the 1910 national census. If, for example, there were 100,000 individuals of Danish origin living in the United States in 1910, the maximum number of immigrants permitted from Denmark in any future year would be 3,000. 
The Johnson Immigration Act of 1924 tightened these regulations in two important ways. The percentage for calculating the quotas was reduced from 3% to 2%, and instead of the 1910 census, the quota numbers would be based on an earlier census, the one taken in 1890. The restrictions were intensified in order to reduce the number of Jewish and Italian immigrants, since the bulk of Jews and Italians in the US had arrived after 1890. 
The sponsors of the legislation made no secret of their motives. The Johnson Act was submitted to Congress with a report by the chief of the United States Consular Service, Wilbur Carr, that characterized would-be Jewish immigrants from Poland as “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits…lacking any conception of patriotism or national spirit.”

A BAD SYSTEM MADE WORSE 

In the public debates over immigration that took place in the 1920s, Franklin D. Roosevelt came down squarely on the side of the restrictionists. As the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1920, Roosevelt gave an interview to the Brooklyn Eagle in which he expressed concern that immigrants tended to concentrate in urban areas and retain their ethnic heritage: “The foreign elements…do not easily conform to the manners and the customs and the requirements of their new home.” 
The solution he proposed was dispersal and rapid assimilation: “The remedy for this should be the distribution of aliens in various parts of the country.” Writing in the Macon Daily Telegraph in 1925, FDR said he favored the admission of some Europeans, so long as they had “blood of the right sort.” He urged restricting immigration for “a good many years to come” so the United States would have time to “digest” those already admitted. 
The immigration system that was adopted in the 1920s was made even more restrictive by President Herbert Hoover in 1930. Responding to the onset of the Great Depression, Hoover instructed consular officials to reject all applicants who were “likely to become a public charge,” that is, dependent on government assistance. It was left to the consuls to make that determination on a case-by-case basis. 
The Roosevelt administration inherited this harsh system and made it worse. When Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933, large numbers of German Jews urgently began looking for countries that would shelter them from the Nazis —and US consular officials in Germany urgently looked for ways to reject their applications. By crafting a maze of bureaucracy and unreasonably rigorous requirements, these officials ensured that most Jewish refugees would never reach America’s shores. Prof. David S. Wyman characterized those restrictions as “paper walls” in his 1968 book of that name. 
Those walls ensured that the quotas would almost never be filled. The German quota was 25,957. Just 5.3%, or 1,375, of the quota places were used in 1933, Hitler’s first year in power. Of the next 12 years, the German quota was filled in only one. Places that were unused at the end of the year did not spill over into the next year; they simply expired. In 1934, a total of 3,515 immigrants filled 13.7% of the quota; the next year, 20.2% of the quota was filled (4,891 immigrants); and in 1936, the total was 24.3% (or 6,073 immigrants). 
In most of those 12 years, less than 25% of the quota was filled. As the Nazi persecution of Jews intensified, the US quota system functioned precisely as its creators had intended: It kept out all but a relative handful of Jews. 

THE PAPER WALLS 

The visa application form, which had to be filled out in triplicate, was more than four feet long. Its length, however, was the least of the difficulties applicants faced. To begin with, the “likely to become a public charge” clause posed a kind of Catch-22. The applicant had to prove he would have a means of support in the US—but foreigners were not permitted to secure employment while they still lived abroad. 
Typically, the way to satisfy this requirement was to provide an affidavit from an American citizen guaranteeing financial support until the immigrant found work. Obviously, many German Jews did not have American relatives or friends. Even for those who did, however, not just any relative would do. When New York Governor Herbert Lehman asked FDR in 1935 about the seemingly extraneous visa requirements, the president replied that guarantees offered by anyone other than a parent or child would be treated skeptically, because “a distant relative” might not feel any “legal or moral obligation toward the applicant,” as closer relatives presumably would. 
In the case of 19-year-old Hermann Kilsheimer, for instance, three relatives did not suffice. He presented the American consulate in Stuttgart with affidavits from his brother-in-law and two cousins, all gainfully employed American citizens, pledging to support him. The cousins’ affidavits were rejected on the grounds that they were not close enough relatives, and the consul decided that Hermann’s brother-in-law earned too little to both support his own family and pay for Hermann’s tuition if he chose to attend college. 
The reasoning behind other rejections of visa applications ranged from absurd to maddening. Numerous German Jewish refugee students, for example, were admitted to American universities but were prevented from entering the United States. As Raymond Geist of the US consulate in Berlin explained in turning down a student who had been accepted by Dropsie College (Philadelphia), “He is a potential refugee from Germany and hence is unable to submit proof that he will be in a position to leave the United States upon the completion of his schooling.”
Faculty members at accredited European universities who were offered positions at American universities were eligible for non-quota visas. However, when the Hebrew Union College established a college-in-exile and began inviting European Jewish scholars to its faculty, the Roosevelt administration threw up an array of roadblocks. One distinguished German Jewish scholar was disqualified on the grounds that he was primarily a librarian rather than a full-time professor. 
The State Department also accepted the Nazi regime’s downgrading of the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, from Hochshule (an institute of higher learning, or college) to Lehranstalt (a lower-level institution of learning; an academy), which made its faculty members ineligible for non-quota visas because their home institution no longer was considered to be at the level of a university.

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PART 2:  THE INCONVENIENCE OF RESCUING JEWS


When the world-famous German Jewish chemist Fritz Haber approached US Ambassador to Germany William Dodd in July 1933 to ask about “the possibilities in America for emigrants with distinguished records here in science,” Dodd told him (according to Dodd’s diary) “that the law allowed none now, the quota being filled.” In fact, the German quota was 95% unfilled that year. 
Ten year-old Herbert Friedman was denied permission to accompany his mother and brother to the United States in 1936 after an examining physician at the Stuttgart consulate claimed he had tuberculosis. Tests all proved negative, and an array of German and American specialists who reviewed his X-rays likewise concluded that he did not have the disease. Yet the consulate would not budge. The family eventually managed to enlist the help of Albert Einstein, who, in a letter to the surgeon general about the case, reported: 
“I have spoken to a reliable young man who recently emigrated from Germany; when I told him about the Stuttgart Consulate’s refusal to issue the visa for the child, without giving the young man the reason for the refusal [that is, Einstein did not tell him about the claim of tuberculosis—RM], he immediately said, ‘That is an old story. Tuberculosis!’ This shows clearly that this case is not an isolated case but that it is becoming a dangerous practice. “

THE KETUBAH DILEMMA

Some applicants in Germany ran into trouble when they presented a ketubah, the traditional Jewish religious wedding certificate, as evidence of their marital status. Some of these Jews had been married in a religious ceremony only, and not according to civil law, while others simply found it impossible to obtain evidence of their marital status from a Nazi government office, or else had been married in Russia before the Soviet takeover and could not enter the USSR to retrieve documentation. 
US consular officials refused to recognize a ketubah as proof of marriage and therefore deemed the applicants’ children “illegitimate” and rejected the family on the grounds of low moral character. In these cases and many others, consular officials used their discretionary abilities to achieve what one consul characterized as “the Department’s desire to keep immigration to a minimum.”  
In late 1936, there was a modest increase in the number of German Jews admitted to the United States. By the end of 1937, a total of 11,127 immigrants from Germany had arrived, representing 42.1% of the available spaces. Consuls in Germany had complained that they were short-staffed, so Foreign Service Inspector Jerome Klahr Huddle was sent to Germany to assess the situation. In his report, Huddle recommended that more-distant relatives could be relied upon to provide support, because they undoubtedly felt genuine sympathy for their persecuted family members. Eliot Coulter of the Visa Division agreed, in an internal memorandum, that “the Jewish people often have a high sense of responsibility toward their relatives, including distant relatives whom they may not have seen.” 
Yet the majority of the German quota remained unfilled. John Farr Simmons, chief of the State Department’s Visa Division in the 1930s, was proud to note, in 1937, “the drastic reduction in immigration” that “was merely an obvious and predictable result of administrative practices.” 

SPURNED OPPORTUNITIES 

Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 (the Anschluss) marked a significant intensification of the Jewish refugee crisis. Now a second major European Jewish community was in need of a haven. The well-publicized scenes of anti-Jewish brutality accompanying the German army’s entrance into Austria, including Jews being forced to scrub the streets with toothbrushes, showed that the problem was reaching crisis proportions. 
Although polls showed most Americans still opposed relaxing immigration restrictions, a handful of members of Congress and journalists began urging US intervention. Senior State Department officials decided to—in the words of the department’s internal year-end review—“get out in front and attempt to guide” the pressure before it got out of hand. They conceived the idea of an international conference on the refugee problem, to create an impression of US concern while coaxing other countries to assume responsibility for the bulk of the refugees. 
On March 24, 1938, President Roosevelt announced he was inviting 32 countries to send representatives to a conference in the French resort town of Évian-les-Bains. FDR emphasized in his announcement that “no nation would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation.” He did permit the German and Austrian quotas, now combined, to be filled that year, the only year that happened. 
With one exception, the delegates at Évian proclaimed their countries’ unwillingness to accept more Jews. Typical was the Australian delegate, who bluntly asserted that “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” The only exception was the tiny Dominican Republic, which declared it would accept as many as 100,000 Jewish refugees. 
Scholars have chronicled the sad fate of that offer. After the first several hundred refugees were settled in the Dominican region of Sosua, the “biggest problem” the project encountered—according to historian Marion A. Kaplan—was the “unrelenting US opposition” to bringing in more refugees and “the State Department’s hostility and obstructionism.” Prof. Allen Wells found that Roosevelt administration officials harbored paranoid fears that some German Jewish refugees entering Sosua would serve as spies for the Nazis and pressured the Dominican haven organizers to refrain from bringing in more Jews. 
Several additional opportunities to assist Jewish refugees in 1938 and 1939 likewise were spurned by the Roosevelt administration. The president refused to support the Wagner–Rogers bill of 1939, which would have admitted 20,000 German children outside the quota. The legislation went nowhere, thanks to the sentiments of nativists such as Laura Delano Houghteling, a cousin of FDR and wife of the US commissioner of immigration, who complained that “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.” 
In the spring of the same year, 930 German Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis were turned away from Cuba and the United States. The German–Austrian quota was already filled, and any proposal to Congress to admit them likely would have been defeated. However, they could have been admitted as tourists to the US Virgin Islands, as Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., proposed at the time. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, after conferring with the president, rejected Morgenthau’s proposal on the grounds that the passengers could not demonstrate they had permanent residences in Nazi Germany to which they would return after their visas expired. 

EMERGENCY VISAS 

In the aftermath of the German conquest of France in June 1940, thousands of refugees, including many exiled German Jews, fled to southern France to avoid capture by the Nazis. Many refugee families included members who were prominent artists, scientists, and intellectuals. On June 22, Marshal Petain’s Vichy regime, the ruling authority in the southern part of the country, signed an agreement with the Nazis agreeing to “surrender on demand” anyone sought by the Germans. 
In the days to follow, American friends and colleagues of the refugees established the Emergency Rescue Committee, hoping to bring renowned cultural figures to the United States. With help from the First Lady, the committee secured President Roosevelt’s authorization of emergency visas for several hundred artists and intellectuals and their families. The president was receptive to the proposal precisely because it was not a typical request to admit ordinary Jewish refugees. The world-famous exiles in France were the cream of European civilization; the fact that most of them were Jewish was incidental. 
American journalist Varian Fry volunteered to lead the mission. He arrived in Marseille in August 1940 with a list of 200 endangered individuals and $3,000 taped to his leg to hide it from the Gestapo. During the months to follow, Fry’s network—which included a dissident US consul, Hiram Bingham IV—rescued an estimated 2,000 refugees, in many cases by smuggling them over the Pyrenees into Spain disguised as field workers. 
Catching wind of the Fry operation, furious German and French officials complained to the State Department. Secretary of State Cordell Hull responded with a telegram, in September 1940, to the American ambassador in Paris, instructing him to inform Fry that “THIS GOVERNMENT DOES NOT REPEAT NOT COUNTENANCE ANY ACTIVITIES BY AMERICAN CITIZENS DESIRING TO EVADE THE LAWS OF THE GOVERNMENTS WITH WHICH THIS COUNTRY MAINTAINS FRIENDLY RELATIONS.” Hull also sent a telegram to Fry, pressing him to “return immediately” to the United States in view of “local developments,” meaning the opposition of the Germans and French. When Fry failed to heed that demand, the Roosevelt administration refused to renew his passport, thus forcing him to leave France. It also transferred Bingham to Portugal, then Argentina. 

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PART 3:  WHY FDR ABANDONED THE JEWS

Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, a personal friend of President Roosevelt, was in charge of 23 of the State Department’s 42 divisions, including the visa section. In a June 26, 1940 memo, Long advised his colleagues: 
“We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States…by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices, which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” 
The German invasion of Poland the previous September, followed by the rapid conquest of Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France in the spring of 1940, provoked a wave of fear—among the general public and within the administration—of Nazi spies reaching the United States. Newspapers frequently published wild stories about Hitler planning to send “slave spies” to the United States. Attorney General Robert Jackson complained to the cabinet that “hysteria is sweeping the country against aliens and fifth columnists.”  
The president’s rhetoric fanned the flames. FDR warned about “the treacherous use of the ‘fifth column’ by persons supposed to be peaceful visitors [but] actually a part of an enemy unit of occupation.” In fact, there was only one instance in which a Nazi disguised as a Jewish refugee reached the Western hemisphere; he was captured in Cuba and executed. 
Three days after Long’s June 1940 memo, the State Department ordered consuls abroad to reject applications from anyone about whom they had “any doubt whatsoever.” The new instruction specifically noted that this policy would result in “a drastic reduction in the number of quota and nonquota immigration visas issued.” It worked as intended: In the following year, immigration from Germany and Austria was kept to just 48% of the quota.

JEWISH SPIES FOR HITLER?

In the spring of 1941, with Roosevelt’s approval, Long devised what has come to be known as the Close Relatives Edict. On June 5, 1941, he instructed all US consuls abroad to reject visa applicants who had a “parent, brother, sister, spouse, or child” in any territory occupied by Germany, Italy, or the Soviet Union. The rationale was that the relatives might be taken hostage in order to force the immigrant to become a Nazi or Soviet spy. 
Refugee advocates were horrified. The political weekly The Nation (July 19, 1941) denounced the new regulation as “brutal and unjust.” The October 1941 issue of Workmen’s Circle Call, a Jewish immigrant laborers’ publication, described it as “cruel and unimaginative.” B’nai B’rith’s National Jewish Monthly (December 1941) asserted that the new policy could be called “Keep Your Tired, Your Poor”—a reversal of the famous poem inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. 
Protests were to no avail: The administration refused to budge. Actualization of the quota from Germany fell to less than 18% in 1942; only 14% of the quota for immigrants from German-occupied Poland was filled that year. In 1943, less than 5% of the German quota was used, as was only 16% of that for German-occupied France. A total of almost 190,000 quota places from Axis-controlled European countries were left unused during the Hitler years. 

MOTIVES 

What motivated senior State Department officials to take such positions regarding Jewish immigration? Antisemitism certainly played a role. Wilbur Carr, an assistant secretary of state in the Roosevelt administration, wrote in a 1934 diary entry that he preferred a particular summer resort because it was so “different from the Jewish atmosphere of the Claridge.” Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle confided to his diary in 1940, “The Jewish group, wherever you find it, is not only pro-English, but will sacrifice American interests to English interests…It is horrible to see one phase of the Nazi propaganda justifying itself a little.” Undersecretary of State William Phillips, in his diary (on May 18, 1923), once described a Soviet official as “a perfect little rat of a Jew.” It is no exaggeration to say that antisemitism was rife in Roosevelt’s State Department. 
Such sentiments also were common among the consular officials in Europe who directly decided the fate of visa applicants. Prof. Bat-Ami Zucker, in her book In Search of Refuge, the definitive study of US consular officials in Nazi Germany, found that the consuls “often commented on the danger of permitting a flood of Jewish immigration into the US,” warned of “its potentially dangerous impact on American society,” and suspected “a Jewish conspiracy in the United States to pressure the administration into facilitating immigration.” 
In a similar spirit, William Peck, at the US consulate in Marseilles, wrote to a colleague that he “deplore[d] as much as anyone the influx into the United States of certain refugee elements.” He was open to immigration by “aged people,” because they “will not reproduce and can do our country no harm.” On the other hand, “the young ones may be suffering, but the history of their race shows that suffering does not kill many of them.”  
However, antisemitism within the State Department alone does not suffice to explain US immigration policy, because it was President Roosevelt, not Breckinridge Long, who was the final authority. Ignorance was not the issue: President Roosevelt’s correspondence makes clear that he was aware the quotas were underfilled. Many references in the correspondence and diaries of Breckinridge Long allude to his regular briefings of the president on immigration policy, to which FDR responded positively. 
Some historians have explained Roosevelt’s strict policy as anticipating the likely electoral consequences (that is, the strong public opposition to immigration) and congressional opposition to liberalizing the immigration quotas, but those factors do not reflect that what is under discussion here is immigration within the existing quotas, not any effort to change the immigration system. An unpublicized instruction from the White House to the State Department to permit the existing German quota to be filled would have saved numerous lives while likely causing only the tiniest of political ripples. 

THE JAPANESE AND THE JEWS

A more plausible explanation is Roosevelt’s attitude toward minority groups that he regarded as unassimilable. FDR in general exhibited little sympathy for immigration, expressed concern about what he saw as immigrants’ resistance to assimilation, and harbored racist sentiments about the dangers of “mingling Asiatic blood with American blood.” His conviction that the Japanese were biologically different, undesirable, and untrustworthy made Roosevelt was receptive to the proposal by some of his military advisers, after Pearl Harbor, to incarcerate Japanese Americans lest their “undiluted racial strains” inspire them to secretly assist the Japanese war effort. By order of the president, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up throughout California and shipped to internment camps in Arizona, Wyoming, Arkansas, and elsewhere in 1942, even though there was not a single documented case of a Japanese American spying for Japan in World War II 
Roosevelt’s private remarks about Jews in many ways echoed what he wrote and said about Asians. Jews, he believed, tended to overcrowd specific geographical locations, dominate certain professions, and exercise undue influence. At a White House luncheon in May 1943, FDR told British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that “the best way to settle the Jewish question” would be “to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” According to Vice President Henry Wallace’s account of the conversation, Roosevelt said he had “tried this out in Marietta [Meriwether] County, Georgia, and at Hyde Park…adding four or five Jewish families at each place. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.” 
Roosevelt resented what he perceived as excessive Jewish representation in a variety of institutions. As a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers in 1923, he helped institute a quota to limit the number of Jews admitted to 15% of each class, and still boasted about doing so two decades later. In 1941, FDR remarked at a cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon. 
The president was concerned about Jewish influence abroad, too. In 1938, FDR privately suggested to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the era’s most prominent American Jewish leader, that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were to blame for provoking antisemitism there. 
In the same spirit, President Roosevelt remarked at the 1943 Casablanca Conference that in governing the 330,000 Jews in North Africa, “the number of Jews [allowed to enter various professions] should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population,” which “would not permit them to overcrowd the professions.” He said this “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.”
Certain individual, assimilated Jews could be useful to FDR as political allies or advisers, but the presence of a substantial number of Jews, especially the less assimilated kind, was, in his view, undesirable. Roosevelt’s private views help explain the otherwise inexplicable policy of suppressing refugee immigration far below the legal limits. His vision of America was of a nation that would be overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, with no room for any substantial number of others. 

WHAT OPTIONS EXISTED? 

Realistically, what options existed for President Roosevelt to assist Jewish refugees without endangering his political position or risking a difficult, and probably unsuccessful, clash with Congress? 
First, filling the existing quotas. The policy of almost never allowing the quotas to be filled “cost Jewish lives directly,” and “the restrictionist policy also played a crucial role in Nazi Germany’s decision to solve its ‘Jewish problem’ by more radical means,” Prof. Henry Feingold has argued; “The visa system became literally an adjunct to Berlin’s murderous plan for the Jews.”
Next, permitting more non-quota immigration. The existing law permitted professors, college students, and members of the clergy and their families to enter the United States outside the quotas. Yet from 1933 to 1941, the US admitted only 698 students identified as “Hebrews,” 944 professors (not all of them Jews), and 2,184 “ministers” (not all of them rabbis). With a more humane attitude, the administration could have taken advantage of this legal loophole and granted haven to many more endangered Jews. 
Finally, offering temporary admission to US territories. The determination as to whether an applicant for a tourist visa had a valid return address was strictly arbitrary; a more generous approach would have looked past that technicality and granted Jewish refugees temporary haven in an American territory, such as the Virgin Islands, whose governor offered to take them in, a move that would likely not have provoked any substantial domestic opposition. 
Tragically, the Roosevelt administration opted to turn its back on traditional American attitudes toward the downtrodden and chose instead, as Albert Einstein wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, “to make immigration impossible by erecting a wall of bureaucratic measures.”

Sunday, April 29, 2018

MEMO TO THE PRESIDENT: David Horowitz Deserves The Presidential Medal of Freedom


Sign the petition here!

Each year, on or around the Fourth of July, the President of the United States traditionally awards The Presidential Medal of Freedom to recipients who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural, or other significant public or private endeavors."

The list of recipients of the prize, established by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, is a long one, which can be found on Wikipedia. Winners have included Cesar Chavez, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Barbara Streisand, Joan Ganz Cooney, Ellen de Generes, and Bill Cosby, among others, such as William F. Buckley, Robert Conquest, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Whittaker Chambers.

One name lamentably still missing from the long list of recipients is author and activist David Horowitz, founder of the eponymous David Horowitz Freedom Center, soon to enter his eighth decade of fighting the good fight.

The time has come to right this sin of omission.

Perhaps no living American has done more for the cause of Freedom than David Horowitz.To those who know him, his personal trajectory from Communist Youth to Patriotic Senior Citizen serves as a Pilgrim's Progress towards Freedom, charting a path towards Americanism through tumultuous events the past century.  Throughout it all, Horowitz was striving for freedom for himself and his fellow citizens, sometimes making mistakes, but always with his eye on the prize of Freedom. Earlier in his life, David was active in the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements. He went to England to work on the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and was a friend of Isaac Deutscher, as well as a protege of Ralph Milliband, the British Marxist professor, who was father of Labour Party Leader Ed Milliband and brother David Milliband, currently head of the International Rescue Committee. He edited Ramparts Magazine, helped at the founding of the Black Panthers, and In These Times Magazine...and then, after the tragic murder of his bookkeeper Betty Van Patter in 1974, had second thoughts about the road to Freedom he had chosen to take.

With Peter Collier, he published a series of best-selling dynastic biographies of the Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Ford families. Subsequently, he and Collier published an article in the Washington Post under the title "Lefties for Regan" (changed later to "Goodbye to All That"). They concluded:
One of the few saving graces of age is a deeper perspective on the passions of youth. Looking back on the left's revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years, we have painfully learned what should have been obvious all along: that we live in an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made worse -- much worse. This is a conservative assessment, but on the basis of half a lifetime's experience, it seems about right.
After that, he dedicated himself to fighting Communism, and after the Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11, its partner totalitarian ideology, Islamic Fundamentalism.

In addition to a lengthy list of publications, studies, and memoirs, including the  9-volume Black Book of the American Left, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has supported American freedom fighters through  websites, conferences, events and videos, providing intellectual, moral, and tactical support to beleaguered patriots in a hostile cultural climate.

Last but certainly not least, he wrote THE BIG AGENDA: President Trumps Plan to Save America in 2017, a New York Times Bestseller, and one of the first books to explain how "Americans could roll up their sleeves and begin the hard work of restoring the nation to greatness again."

One could go on and on, but the bottom line is that no other American better personifies the pathway to patriotism than David Horowitz--who abandoned Communist totalitarianism, race-hatred, and anti-Americanism in order to champion the cause of Freedom and Love of Country and preserve, protect, and defend the USA--at the risk of his own life and limb (he needs a bodyguard to speak on college campuses).

For his supreme dedication to Freedom, as well as lifelong record of writing, scholarship, service, and activism, David Horowitz deserves to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the Trump Administration.

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Coming to the Arts Club of Washington on April 26th...

OPEN TO MEMBERS AND GUESTS ONLY
CINEMA COMMITTEE PRESENTS
CINEMA LUNCH
Please join us for our inaugural Cinema Lunch. We’ll have a brief show-and-tell from Cinematography Committee Chair Larry Jarvik about his role in the 2018 YouTube film, "THE TRUMP EFFECT: Deprogramming the American Mind," a feature documentary produced and directed by Agustin Blazquez, from 12 noon-12:30 pm, followed by a Two-Course Club Lunch for $20.

Registration required, contact the Arts Club for reservations: (202) 331-7282.

Friday, April 13, 2018

This May Be The Best Article Ever Written About American Jews And The Holocaust...


THE BETRAYAL OF THE HOLOCAUST

by Daniel Greenfield

Reprinted by permission of the author from https://sultanknish.blogspot.com.

When we talk about the Holocaust, we are talking about the mass murder of millions of Jews.

The dead included my grandparents and countless others, shot, starved, gassed, beaten to death and buried in mass graves. And yet the lessons of the Holocaust in its commemorations rarely have anything to do with Jewish lives. 

Millions of dollars have been spent building memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, even as Iran is spending its millions on building another kind of memorial to the Holocaust, in the form of nuclear technology. Ben Rhodes, the Obama crony who helped sell the Iranian Big Lie, sits on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Council. The Washington D.C. museum ignores the murder of Jews in Israel, but is very worked up over the deaths of Muslims in Myanmar, in Egypt and around the world.

Millions more are spent, by some of the same groups that claim an interest in Holocaust education, on bringing Muslim migrants to America and Europe to carry out the promise of an Islamic apocalypse in which, as the Hadith states, "The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him."

That is what the Islamic Holocaust looks like.

If you want to see it slowly getting underway, visit Paris or Jerusalem.

But the murder of Jews, in Israel or Europe, somehow has nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Virtually every major Jewish organization, even the Orthodox Union, were pressured into signing on to obscenely despicable statements equating Muslim migrants to Holocaust victims.

The Holocaust isn't just an uncomfortable subject for Germans, Russians or Poles. It's a very uncomfortable subject for American Jews. The same liberal Jewish organizations that took a vocal part in the civil rights movement remained deathly silent about the murder of six million Jews.

Why the silence? The same reason they didn't protest the Iran Deal too loudly.

The Obama of the Holocaust was named FDR. His administration was equally anti-Semitic. And chose to ignore the mass murder of Jews until protests by Zionist activists became too loud to ignore.

Saving six million Jews was not a feel good liberal cause. The civil rights movement was.

And it's never about doing the right thing. It's about what looks good. It's what's popular.

The same organizations that stayed silent during the Holocaust then rebranded it as a universalist civil rights program. The real lesson of the Holocaust isn't, "Don't allowed Jews to be killed."

It's fight for every leftist cause on the planet... except that outmoded "not killing Jews" one.

The same Jewish organizations that wouldn't dream of missing a Holocaust commemoration broadcast their commitment to the "Two State Solution" almost as loudly as to the Holocaust.

The only lesson they learned is that another Holocaust needs better marketing.

The Final Solution, with its immediate extermination of the Jews, has been replaced by the Two State Solution, an intermediate process in which the land on which Jews can live is partitioned into smaller and smaller pieces.

The Lebensraum of Islam demands ever more breathing room. And fewer breathing Jews. Israel is carved up into smaller indefensible ghettos. And Jews are barred from living outside those ghettos. Those who are are "settlers" who must be evicted for the sake of the peace that Islam always brings.

Even if they're "settling" in Jerusalem.: the oldest Jewish city in history.

But the real lesson of the Holocaust is that if we don't destroy Israel, and bring the migrant synagogue bombers and senior citizen murderers of tomorrow to Europe, we're no better than the Nazis.

Just ask a leftist.

The Holocaust isn't very complicated because murder isn't very complicated. The easy lesson of murder is don't let it happen again.

It is easier to build another memorial than to look into your heart and ask why two generations later, the majority of the American Jewish community was still too cowardly to stand up to a liberal icon in the White House... when the lives of millions of Jews were on the line.

From FDR to Obama, American Jewish leaders had two opportunities to stand up to a liberal icon and save Jewish lives. No amount of memorials can disguise the fact that they learned nothing.

The best memorial to the dead is to stop aiding their murderers.

Every Jewish organization that bowed to FDR and Obama have blood on their hands. Every Jewish organization that trumpets the Two State Solution has blood on its hands. Every Jewish organization that mainstream BDS activists, that criticizes Israel and America for fighting terrorism, that imports Muslim migrants while demanding the expulsion of Jewish "settlers" has blood on its hands.

I don't remember the Holocaust because of a museum. I remember because of my grandparents. I remember because my Jewishness doesn't come from a memorial, it's always been a part of me.

The Holocaust told us a harsh truth about the world and human nature. Its commemorations soften the edges. But we need those harsh truths to know what lies behind the comfortable curtain.

Death is the harshest truth. The next harshest truth is betrayal. And the Jews have most often been betrayed by Jews escaping their Jewishness. Some, like George Soros, did it in the most literal way possible. Others did it by kvelling to an FDR speech while ignoring the ash drifting over Europe. Today, they affirm the Two State Solution, ignore Iran's nuclear program and click on that inspirational speech by Obama, Cory Booker or the political culture hero next in line.

They ignore the Jews being murdered in Israel or in Paris. Dead Jews have nothing to do with their Holocaust. That refusal to listen and understand is how it began. The Jews of Poland didn't pay attention to what was going on in Germany. The Jews of Hungary didn't pay attention to what was going on in Poland. And American Jewish organizations all too often ignored all of them.

The Holocaust doesn't need hundred million dollar museums. To commemorate it, we must pay attention. And we must never let the propaganda of the killers blind us to their crimes.

That's easy to say about the Nazis, it's a lot harder when it comes to the PLO, Iran and Hamas.

It's easy to feel good about disavowing a discredited and fallen ideology. There's no act of courage there. But try disavowing the Two State Solution and the Iran Deal. That's a commemoration.

Thursday, April 05, 2018

Some Thoughts on the YouTube Shooting...


Recently Mark Steyn and Scott Adams have both offered very interesting analyses of Nasim Aghdam's YouTube Shooting, which I think are worth serious consideration.

First, from Mark Steyn's post, The Grand Convergence:

The San Bruno attack also underlines a point I've been making for over a decade, ever since my troubles with Canada's "human rights" commissions: "Hate speech" doesn't lead to violence so much as restraints on so-called "hate speech" do - because, when you tell someone you can't say that, there's nothing left for him to do but open fire or plant his bomb. Restricting speech - or even being perceived to be restricting speech - incentivizes violence as the only alternative. As you'll notice in YouTube comments, I'm often derided as a pansy fag loser by the likes of ShitlordWarrior473 for sitting around talking about immigration policy as opposed to getting out in the street and taking direct action. In a culture ever more inimical to freedom of expression, there'll be more of that: The less you're permitted to say, the more violence there will be.

Google/YouTube and Facebook do not, of course, make laws, but their algorithms have more real-world impact than most legislation - and, having started out as more or less even-handed free-for-alls, they somehow thought it was a great idea to give the impression that they're increasingly happy to assist the likes of Angela Merkel and Theresa May as arbiters of approved public discourse. Facebook, for example, recently adjusted its algorithm, and by that mere tweak deprived Breitbart of 90 per cent of its ad revenue. That's their right, but it may not have been a prudent idea to reveal how easily they can do that to you.

What happened yesterday is a remarkable convergence of the spirits of the age: mass shootings, immigration, the Big Tech thought-police, the long reach of the Iranian Revolution, the refugee racket, animal rights, vegan music videos... It was the latest mismatched meeting between east and west in the age of the Great Migrations: Nasim Aghdam died two days before her 39th birthday, still living (according to news reports) with either her parents or her grandmother. She came to America at the age of seventeen, and spent two decades in what appears to be a sad and confused search to find something to give her life meaning. But in a cruder sense the horror in San Bruno was also a sudden meeting of two worlds hitherto assumed to be hermetically sealed from each other: the cool, dispassionate, dehumanized, algorithmic hum of High Tech - and the raw, primal, murderous rage breaking through from those on the receiving end.
Next, from the transcript of yesterday's Scott Adams' Periscope broadcast:

01:55
we won't know her exact thinking at the
01:57
moment but given her YouTube videos
02:00
which by now you've probably seen she
02:04
was here the things you know about her
02:06
she was an artist yeah you could argue
02:10
whether her art was
02:12
what you'd like to say I don't mean to
02:16
make light of this but when the the
02:19
first clips of the shooters youtube
02:23
channel started coming out and I looked
02:26
at a few and maybe you have a different
02:30
opinion but I couldn't stop looking at
02:34
them I know what you're gonna say you
02:40
can say that's not ours that's just
02:42
crazy random stuff she's got chickens
02:45
and different backgrounds and crazy
02:47
clothes and there's nothing to it except
02:49
randomness and insanity
02:51
well you know there's a there's a fine
02:53
line between art and insanity and I'm
03:01
just speaking for myself I couldn't tear
03:03
my fate I couldn't tear myself away from
03:05
the videos they are weirdly I don't know
03:12
not provocative but they're they're
03:15
interesting in a way that you can't
03:18
really explain yeah somebody used the
03:21
phrase performance art here and one of
03:26
the things you can't you can't
03:30
completely rule out at this point is
03:33
that even the murder wasn't her mind art
03:39
now I don't want to I'm not trying to
03:43
glamorize this alright it was just a
03:45
crazy person with a gun is is the way we
03:48
should remember this but I wonder if in
03:51
her mind this was performance arts
03:55
because it shouldn't look like it you
03:59
know it was there was a point to it you
04:03
know because she had been allegedly
04:04
throttled on on YouTube I don't know if
04:07
that's true but I guess she was
04:09
concerned about that and so there was a
04:12
there was a societal point to it she did
04:17
it in a a welcome let's say a considered
04:21
way meaning she went to their
04:22
headquarters
04:23
she brought a gun which was
04:25
you know for a woman bringing a gun for
04:29
a mass murderer is so out of the norm
04:32
that that's sort of what makes it
04:34
performance art if she had just done a
04:36
normal thing in a normal way it's not
04:38
really art so I don't want to glamorize
04:41
this but in terms of looking for a
04:44
motive you have to wonder if this was
04:49
sort of a a mentally ill expansion of
04:55
just what she thought was art you know
04:57
it was sort of the the ultimate
04:59
conclusion of it she we know this you
05:04
wanted attention that's why you have a
05:07
youtube channel she you know that she
05:09
cared about how many people saw it you
05:12
know that she had a point about yeah
05:14
about meat and about veganism
05:17
and killing human beings is sort of
05:23
consistent with her story that she's
05:25
more Pro animal than pro people I
05:28
suppose you could spin it that way so it
05:31
does feel a little performance arty in
05:34
the worst possible way so you know the
05:39
the simple summary is still she was
05:41
crazy and she had a gun and that simple
05:45
summary will explain pretty much all of
05:47
it
05:48
but there is that interesting in a bad
05:51
way interesting element of she was an
05:54
artist all right 




 You can watch Scott Adams' broadcast here:


In addition to these considerations, I thought the YouTube shooting was reminiscent of the assassination of British Labour MP Jo Cox in the run-up to Brexit, which, although carried out by a lunatic, turned out to reflect deeper feelings of more normal people that led to a Brexit win...additionally,  the YouTube attack was a reminder of the death by seppuku of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, which appeared to serve as a publicity stunt for the writer and his oddball ultra-right causes, roughly comparable to veganism and animal-rights issues in the case of the YouTube gunwoman.

YouTube policies of censorship and demonetization have apparently not only endangered the company's reputation and bottom-line, they have seemingly also physically endangered YouTube's personnel and corporate headquarters by triggering at least one disgruntled YouTuber (no trigger warning?).

In an older and more normal world, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki might have lost her job over such a fiasco, but will nepotism, which was once considered evil, prevail in this case, as the CEO is also Google co-founder Sergei Brin's former sister-in-law?