Do Jews Owe Anything to the Democratic Party? Any thanks or gratitude?

expanded on 27 October 2020

Of course, we owe the Democratic Party nothing. We can look at Roosevel's shameful treatment of Jews persecuted in Europe and North Africa before and during the Shoah. Then there was Jimmy Carter's hostility for Israel in the 1970s. And another low point was reached in the presidency of Barak Hussein Obama which saw support for Israel's Islamist enemies and saw the     US undermining Israel at the UN Security Council  [for example, SC Res 2334 of December 2016], in which the Obama gang worked, as it did in various venues for eight years, in favor of apartheid against Jews in the Land of Israel.

Perhaps most damning is the complicity of the revered Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the Shoah. Despite the liberal and humanitarian rhetoric that poured out of FDR, his administration did not work to stop the German nazi mass murder machine nor did they do more than token acts to help Jews escape from the Nazi-fascist domain in Europe. This was true in the 1930s before the Shoah actually got started but Hitler and his gang were already persecuting Jews. It was also true during the years when the Shoah was working at high speed. 

Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits concluded in his book, Faith After the Holocaust, that Roosevelt and his government wanted the Jews to die. It certainly seems that way. 

Even in the 1930s, when German Jews wanted to leave Germany because of the persecutions, FDR's officials imposed obstacles in their way to coming to the United States. It is important to know that at that time immigration to the United States was governed by quotas for different countries. Germany had one of the biggest quotas. Yet this large quota was not filled in the years after Hitler took power [30 January 1933]. Officials of FDR's State Department put up obstacles [on this episode see books and articles by David Wyman, a non-Jew, by the way]. 

During the war, American warplanes could and did reach the area of Poland where the Auschwitz camp was located starting in August 1943 when Sicily was liberated. US  bombers then bombed industrial plants in the area of Auschwitz but not the death camps. When in 1944 Jewish leaders implored the Allies to bomb the railroad tracks that led to Auschwitz and other camps, Roosevelt and Churchill refused, makiing the usual excuses. Jewish-American Democratic politicians were of little help in pushing FDR to help save Jews.

And Roosevelt, sometimes called Saint FDR by detractors, was a Democrat, a hero to the party, and most damning about the Democratic Party is that it still holds annual celebrations to honor and commemorate Roosevelt and his ill legacy.

In subsequent posts, we will look at anti-Israel policies by Democratic presidents Carter and Obama. Recall that both were mentored by the sinister Zbigniew Brzezinski. 

Democratic Party candidate for president, Joe Biden, was a willing partner in Obama administration schemes to harass and discriminate against Jews. I had a personal encounter with Biden in 1975 and I have disliked him ever since. God willing, he will not become the president of the USA.

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References among others:

Josiah E Dubois, Jr, The Devil's Chemists (Boston: Beacon Press 1952). Dubois was a US Treasury official who studied what the US Govt was doing to help Jews under German-Nazi control during the war, Jews who slated for mass murder by the German Nazis. Dubois issued a report under the broad sponsorship of Treasury Secretary Morgenthau entitled: "The Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews." After the war, Dubois served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials foccusing on the case of the German chemical giant, I G Farben.

- - - - - - -about Dubois, see Rafael Medoff, Blowing the Whistle on Genocide - Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. and the Struggle for a U.S. Response to the Holocaust (Purdue U Press 2009). 

Jan Karski, The Story of a Secret State (1944). Karski was the messenger sent by the Polish national underground to the West to tell about events in German-occupied Poland, including the mass murder of Jews that he witnessed first hand. After meeting with Anthony Eden and other British leaders he went to Washington and met with President Roosevelt, among others. He spoke to FDR about various matters, the events in Poland, the starving people, the oppression, etc, he came to the situation of the Jews. He tried to tell FDR about the horrible conditions that the Jews were living under in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Belzec concentration camp [where he had visited]. But Roosevelt did not want to hear about the Jews' suffering and changed the subject.

Arthur D Morse, While Six Million Died (1968)

David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (1984)

Rafael Medoff, The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (2020)  here

Obama & FDR --- Who Was in Charge of the War Department during WW2 & the Holocaust?

In the Spring of election year, a young president's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of reelection. As in 2008, Obama is sweet-talking Jews, some of whom have reportedly escaped from the Democratic Party's corral because of his anti-Israel policies since his inauguration in 2009. He sweet-talked Armenian-Americans too in 2008. Once elected of course, he violated his solemn promise to them to recognize the Armenian genocide. Armenians too have escaped from the corral.

In his efforts to hold on to Jewish and other voters, Mr Promise Breaker has compared himself and had himself compared to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, long a hero of the Democratic Party.
But if the comparison is valid, should it be seen as a merit or demerit of Obama?

That brings us to the AIPAC Conference more than a month ago. In his speech there, Prime Minister Netanyahu brought up a historic fact not known to the general public nor even to many people who consider themselves well-informed. This was the rejection by the US War Department in 1944 of a request by a Jewish organization, the World Jewish Congress, to bomb the crematoria at Auschwitz [Oswiecim in Polish] and the railway lines leading there. Such actions would have significantly delayed the ongoing mass murder process. Here is the relevant excerpt from Netanyahu's speech:

Some commentators would have you believe that stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous than letting Iran have the bomb.

They say that a military confrontation with Iran would undermine the efforts already underway, that it would be ineffective, and that it would provoke even more vindictive action by Iran. I’ve heard these arguments before. In fact, I’ve read them before. In my desk, I have copies of an exchange of letters between the World Jewish Congress and the US War Department. The year was 1944. The World Jewish Congress implored the American government to bomb Auschwitz. The reply came five days later. I want to read it to you. Such an operation could be executed only by diverting considerable air support essential to the success of our forces elsewhere…..and in any case would be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources….And here’s the most remarkable sentence of all. And I quote: Such an effort might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans. Think about that – “even more vindictive action” — than the Holocaust. [full text of speech here-- texts of letters to & from War Dept here]

Now just who was in charge of the executive branch of the US Government at that time, 1944? Who was ultimately responsible for the conduct of the war and for the setting of war aims? Who was the commander-in-chief of US armed forces in WW2? Yes, it was none other than the same Franklin Delano Roosevelt to whom Obama and his flunkeys compare him in order to place him on the same pedestal of idolization on which FDR has unjustly remained since his death. If the comparison is valid, it is not to Obama's credit.

This is not meant as an endorsement of Republicans. The president at the time of the Holocaust was not a Republican, however, but a Democrat. He was indeed idolized by millions of Americans including most Jews at the time. We can't know what a Republican president would have done if there had been one at the time. We do know that representatives and senators of both the Democratic & Republican parties were sympathetic to the Jews during the Shoah. One of the notable ones being Hugh Scott, a Republican representative from Pennsylvania, later a senator. Scott was instrumental in bringing news of the Holocaust to the American public through a discussion with a volunteer with the Bergson Group to whom Scott provided little known information. Yet the Dulles family, Allen, John Foster and Eleanor, who held influential offices in the US Government and were also Republicans, were not sympathetic. But clearly, Jews cannot trust Democrats, especially when their lips overflow with generalities and platitudes about stopping atrocities and genocide.

The Liberal Franklin Roosevelt Urged Keeping Vichy Anti-Jewish Laws in Place

Many, probably most, American Jews were great admirers of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was considered a great Liberal. He was said to have brought America out of the Great Depression that began in 1929. He showed his Liberalism by formally recognizing the Communist Soviet Union and establishing diplomatic relations with it. He quietly helped labor unions to organize previously unorganized industries. His time was the heyday of the CIO. What most Jews were unaware of at the time or did not understand was how Roosevelt and his Administration, including some Republicans prominent in the Administration's foreign policy & foreign relations establishment (notably the Dulleses, John Foster, Allen, and their sister Eleanor), were allowing Nazi mass murder of Jews to proceed unhindered during the war that the US and Britain were fighting against Nazi Germany. Yet helping the Jews by interfering with railroad transports of Jews to the death camps, bombing the crematoria and gas chambers, supplying weapons to partisans in the forests and the ghettoes could have severely interfered with the German war effort. As we know, these actions were not taken nor was any substantial number of Jewish refugees allowed into the United States or its dependencies nor was significant pressure put on Britain to obey its commitment to foster Jewish immigration into the internationally designated Jewish National Home, Israel, instead of excluding Jews from the National Home.

Raphael Medoff has recently come up with the shocking story of how Roosevelt actually encouraged French authorities in North Africa to maintain Vichy Nazi-inspired anti-Jewish laws in effect in that region after its liberation from Vichy control in late 1942-early 1943. This info is new even to me. Its relevance for today is what Jews and Israel can expect from so-called Liberal American politicians. Obama has often been described by his own supporters and admirers as a Liberal in the grand tradition of FDR. This new revelation by Medoff shows us what the grand tradition of FDR actually meant for the freedom and the very lives of Jews.

The following is the introduction to Medoff's article by Bataween of the Point of No Return blog, followed by Medoff's own article:

At Purim in 1943, Jews in North Africa were celebrating their liberation by US troops from Vichy and Nazi occupation with their very own Megillat Hitler. But Dr Raphael Medoff, in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, reveals how the US authorities dragged their feet when it came to repealing the Vichy regime's anti-Jewish measures :

Among the more remarkable documents of the Holocaust is a scroll, created in North Africa in 1943, called “Megillat Hitler.” Written in the style of Megillat Esther and the Purim story, it celebrates the Allies’ liberation of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, which saved the local Jewish communities from the Nazis. What the scroll’s author did not realize, however, was that at the very moment he was setting quill to parchment, those same American authorities were actually trying to keep in place the anti-Jewish legislation imposed in North Africa by the Nazis.On November 8, 1942, American and British forces invaded Nazi-occupied Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It took the Allies just eight days to defeat the Germans and their Vichy French partners in the region.

For the 330,000 Jews of North Africa, the Allied conquest was heaven-sent. The Vichy regime that had ruled since the summer of 1940 had stripped the region’s Jews of their civil rights, severely restricted their entrance to schools and some professions, confiscated Jewish property, and tolerated sporadic pogroms against Jews by local Muslims. In addition, thousands of Jewish men were hauled away to forced-labor camps. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his victory announcement, pledged “the abrogation of all laws and decrees inspired by Nazi governments or Nazi ideologists.”

But there turned out to be a discrepancy between FDR’s public rhetoric and his private feelings.

On January 17, 1943, Roosevelt met in Casablanca with Major-General Charles Nogues, a leader of the new “non-Vichy” regime. When the conversation turned to the question of rights for North African Jewry, Roosevelt did not mince words: “The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) 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 toward 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.” (It is not clear how FDR came up with that wildly exaggerated statistic.)

Various Jewish communities around the world have established local Purim-style celebrations to mark their deliverance from catastrophe.

The Jews of Frankfurt, for example, would hold a “Purim Vintz” one week after Purim, in remembrance of the downfall of an antisemitic agitator in 1620. Libyan Jews traditionally organized a “Purim Ashraf” and a “Purim Bergel” to recall the rescue of Jews in those towns, in 1705 and 1795, respectively.

The Jewish community of Casablanca, for its part, declared the day of the 1942 Allied liberation “Hitler Purim,” and a local scribe, P. Hassine, created the “Megillat Hitler.” (The original is on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.) The seven chapters of the scroll poignantly blend the flavor of the tale of ancient Persia with the amazing stroke of fortune that the Jews of Casablanca had themselves just experienced. It uses phrases straight from Megillat Esther, such as “the month which was turned from sorrow to rejoicing” and “the Jews had light and gladness, joy and honor,” side by side with modern references such as “Cursed be Hitler, cursed be Mussolini.”

The Jews of North Africa had much to celebrate. But after the festivities died down, questions began to arise. The Allies permitted nearly all the original senior officials of the Vichy regime in North Africa to remain in the new government. The Vichy “Office of Jewish Affairs” continued to operate, as did the forced labor camps in which thousands of Jewish men were being held.

American Jewish leaders were loathe to publicly take issue with the Roosevelt administration, but by the spring of 1943, they began speaking out. The American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress charged that “the anti-Jewish legacy of the Nazis remains intact in North Africa” and urged FDR to eliminate the Vichy laws. “The spirit of the Swastika hovers over the Stars and Stripes,” Benzion Netanyahu, director of the U.S. wing of the Revisionist Zionists (and father of Israel’s current prime minister) charged. A group of Jewish GIs in Algiers protested directly to U.S. ambassador Murphy. Editorials in a number of American newspapers echoed this criticism [here]
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Rafael Medoff is director of the David Wyman Institute which specializes on research into Roosevelt Administration policy towards the Jews during the Holocaust [here]

For info on the coup d'etat --mainly carried out by Algerian Jews-- to ease the American landing at Algiers as part of Operation Torch, see:
Elliot A Green, "Jewish Anti-Nazi Resistance in Wartime Algeria," Midstream (January 1989)