Do American Jews Owe Their Votes to the Democratic Party?

expanded 11-4-2018

A number of my fellow American Jews seem to think that there is a moral imperative for them to vote for the Democratic Party. This is a tragic misunderstanding. Despite its egalitarian and inclusive rhetoric over the years, presidents and other high officials belonging to the Democratic Party have inflicted or helped to inflict incalculable harm on the Jewish people. We need only go back to the period of the German National Socialists, Hitler's Nazis, which coincided with the period of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the USA to see how FDR --despite his liberal rhetoric-- helped the Hitler regime to consolidate itself. Meanwwhile FDR and his State Dept made it difficult for Jewish refugees to come to the USA in order to flee from Hitler & his Nazis. Even German Jews who legally should have been covered by the large immigration quota for Germany, were kept out on various pretexts. David Wyman made this very clear in his books and articles.

After WW2 began in late 1939, this policy was maintained even as the Nazi policy of mass murder of Jews had begun to be implemented. Likewise, after the USA entered the war in 1941 the policy continued although the Shoah was now operating in high gear. Yet FDR and his administration tried to suppress the information known to Washington intelligence agencies as early as 1942 about mass murder concentration camps, However, the administration did hold a briefing on the subject for congressional leaders of both parties, although no Jewish congressemen were invited as far as I know. These congressmen were clearly told that genocide was going on against the Jews. And they were asked to keep the subject secret. Nevertheless, one brave congressman, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania ---a Republican by the way-- released the info to an activist for the Committee for a Jewish Army that wanted the USA to sponsor the creation of a Jewish army to fight the Nazis under Allied command.

Later in the war, as the knowledge of the ongoing tragedy. of the mass murder became more widely known, Jewish leaders such as Haim Weizmann tried to move Allied leaders, Churchill and FDR, to do something to help stop or alleviate the mass murder process. They suggested bombing the railroad tracks leading to the concentration camps and perhaps asked also that the crematoria and gas chambers be destroyed by Allied air power, which was possible by mid-1943 when the USA had control of Tunisia. Of course no such help was given. Not long after the American army took Sicily putting American air power even closer to the murder camps in Germany and Poland. This subject has been studied by Arthur Morse, Monty Penkower, William Perl, David Wyman [a non-Jew by the way], Yitshak Ben-Ami, and others. Dwight MacDonald [who called himself an independent Marxist at that time, I believe] published a weekly of sophisticated political commentary called Politics. MacDonald spread knowledge of the Shoah during the war among independent "leftist" intellectuals so the so-called New York intellectuals were aware of the ongoing tragedy and FDR's refusal to act to alleviate it.

Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits wrote in his book, Faith after the Holocaust, that Western leaders wanted the Jews to die. Is there another rational explanation for FDR's inaction?

So much for Saint FDR whom Democrats still honor with yearly dinners honoring him. Obama took part in those dinners.

Without going into detail about other Democratic presidents, jimmy carter and his national insecurity advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski were fairly obvious in their antisemitism, both in regard to Israel and domestically. Abroad Carter and Zbig helped to put the Khomeini regime in power in Iran. Domestically, after General George Brown made derogatory, antisemitic comments about American Jews, the Carter administration refused to dismiss him. Instead Carter worked to get rid of Jewish Democratic congressman Joshua Eilberg, who ironically represented a Pennsylvania congressional district partly overlapping the one Republican Hugh Scott had represented during WW2. Eilberg had called for Brown's dismissal.

Since they took over Iran, the ayatollahs' regime has regularly threatened to destroy Israel and has funded the Lebanese Hizbullah which has made war on Israel, shooting rockets at Israeli population centers in order to kill civilians. The mullahs' Iran also denies the Holocaust but says in so many words that another Shoah would be deserved by the Jews and Israel. This brings us to Iranian efforts to build an A-Bomb or H-Bomb, a very heartwarming effort no doubt meant to bring peace and harmony to the Middle East. This effort has  also been done in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty which apparently bothers very few of those who constantly refer to the notion of interanational law when it comes to vilifying Israel. In 2015 Obama announced his JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal which left plenty of loopholes for Iran to go through in order to soon get The Bomb. One loophole is the ridiculously inadequate and ineffective inspection regime. In other words, Iran can foreclose IAEA inspectors from inspecting many of the suspect nuclear development sites in Iran.

Regarding Israel, Obama favors applying apartheid against Jews keeping them out of most or all of the Judea-Samaria region, the so-called West Bank, although all that region is part of the internationally recognized Jewish National Home [San  Remo 1920, League of Nations 1922]. That is part of the meaning of UN Security Council resolution 2334 passed when Obama was a lame duck president after the election of 2016. Obama worked hard to push that resolution through with approval of all Security Council members save for the US itself which abstained, pretending to US public opinion to be neutral on the matter. Furthermore, Obama subtly derided and defamed Israel in his speeches to the UN General Assembly. Besides that, Obama refused to identify the Jewish victims in the Hypercacher supermarket as Jews or the crime as antisemitism. Instead he called them "random folks in a deli." He repeated this offense in regard to the Pittsburgh massacre of last week by refusing to identify the victims as Jews [to quote him: "We grieve for the Americans murdered in Pittsburgh"]  although he did call for a fight against antisemitism. Of course the victims in Pittsburgh were Americans. But they were murdered because they were Jews. The problem  here is that politicians and anti-Jewish, anti-Israel ideologues define the word antisemitism to suit their own political and ideological purposes,

In light of all the above, and much much more that it would be tedious to include in this short piece, it is obvious that Jews do not owe their votes to the Democratic Party. Neither do Republicans  have a perfect record regarding Jews and Israel. Look at the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations. Jews have a right and duty to evaluate candidates based on their records on life and death Jewish issues and not just on their rhetoric, and rather than on some ignorant simplistic "universal" values while not taking real facts into account [such as Franklin Forer's screed in the Atlantic]. At this time the Republicans are more sympathetic to Jews and Israel while the Democratic Party is more and more under the sway of the Muslim woman-abuser Keith Ellison and of Linda Sarsour who seems in turn  to be the favorite of wealthy and influential movers and shakers behind the scenes.