Posted on 06/07/2010 2:07:40 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Ah, another teachable moment!
This one comes to us from Helen Thomas, the longtime White House reporter and columnist who announced her retirement on Monday. Thomas, of Lebanese ancestry and almost 90, has never been shy about her anti-Israel views, for which, as far as I'm concerned, she is wrong and to which she is entitled. Then the other day, she performed a notable public service by revealing how very little she knew. Asked at a White House event if she had any comments about Israel, Thomas said, "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. . . . Go home. Poland. Germany. And America and everywhere else."
Well, I don't know about "everywhere else," but after World War II, many Jews did attempt to "go home" to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them -- killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.
The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust itself is not well-known anymore, but it played an outsize role in the establishment of the state of Israel. It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Harry Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself. Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered.
In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 -- more than a year after the end of the war -- rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors were killed. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not "go home."(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
And yet for somebody who claims to be so enlightened and intelligent, they still can’t logically explain why they voted for Obama.
Exactly right.
The whole Polish people? You're painting with a very broad brush. Also oversimplifying very complicated relationships.
Basically, today's democrat party is America's version of the National Socialist party. Like NAZIs, they are against gun ownership, in favor of government-controlled health-care, they have a leader that wants a "national security force better equipped than the military", and they hate Jews. The leadership on the left is, in fact, aligning itself with Muslems again, just as NAZI Germany did.
What we thought would never happen again is happening here and now. And many of our own countrymen are on board.
That’s probably the best one could do to try to understand..
I am a Christian and waa never taught to hate Jews.
Led by Captain Abraham Baum - a Jewish American Armor Commander who was Patton's 'Point of the Spear'. Task Force Baum
Regards,
TS
Ditto.
Blacks either.
Certainly not!..
Red and yellow, black and white..they are precious in His sight..Jesus loves the little children of the world.
Drilled into me by my mother..born in 1900.
Excellent analysis. And those who stand with them, will receive the same treatment...As a Zionist, I will be there with them. It is interesting to observe that there is a sifting going on in the world. I truly believe the wheat and the chaff will be tested and the wheat and the tares will be separated. If you can find it, I would recommend two books: “O Jerusalem” by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, and “Germany, Hitler & World War II” by Gerhard L. Weinberg. That is a good start. I have been bitten by the same questions and have been going to Israel since 1980 (I lived there in 1982-83.)
And Truman. And Lyndon Johnson. And the Rapist.
"Rruucy, you gots some 'splainin' to do!"
Yes, he does.
How does that parse with the fact that the Maronite Christians were allies of Israel in the 80's and 90's?
That is very true.
LLS
No, he didn't. Not when he bridges Patton's penny-ante diary entries to the Wannsee Protocols and the Nazi Holocaust.
But that is something liberals specialize in. Newsweek editor Evan Thomas did the same thing in Sea of Thunder, pimping over Bill Halsey about his public statements and exhortations to his troops to "kill Japs!"
He also compared Halsey to his adversary, Admiral Kurita, and it was Halsey who came up short in Thomas's estimation. Kurita was closer to the liberal ideal, you see -- he was so educated .... son and grandson of educators, so very urbane, so..... Confucian and all. Whereas Halsey was just a "typical white person" (to quote a more recent command authority), a narrowminded, whitebread American bigot. Many virtues, of course <discount, discount>, but ..... limited.
Agreed. We teach our children that there is no such thing as neutral, if you aren’t following and serving God, then you are following and serving Satan. It is my hope and prayer that they will always serve God, even when the painful persecution begins.
No, he didn’t. He’s playing into the same myth that Helen Thomas perpetrated: that Israel is some kind of European colonial state. In reality, more than half of Israel’s Jews hail from the Middle East, Africa or Central Asia. They were never in Germany or Poland, and certainly can’t go “back” there. He’s also wrong on another ground: when bigots say that a group should go “back” to where they came from, they mean some kind of ancestral homeland. But Jews aren’t from Germany or Poland, they merely sojourned their during their exile. Germany and Poland aren’t the Jewish homeland. Israel is.
The problem is that her father was from a Lebanon still under the strong influence of the Ottoman Empire when he emigrated ~ which simply meant he wasn't on the scene when the French created a semi-independent Lebanon out of their Syrian holding (spoils of WWI).
No doubt that process caused its own concern to anyone with relatives in Lebanon, or Syria. By 1941 Lebanon was in the hands of Hitler's Germany.
It's probably fair to ask what Helen's family thought about the relocation of so many Jews from DP camps in Germany to the new state of israel.
Gee whiz, I've talked to folks who liberated such camps, and people who were held in such camps (and survived). Even met some Schindler Jews ~ inlaws of a friend of mine.
I think they were all human beings and had normal emotions.
After the 1948 war the flow of North African and ME Jews to Israel increased of course, but in 1945-1947 the Jews languishing in DP camps in Germany were going primarily to Israel and the United States.
I think Cohen is wrong in his estimation of how many Jews came to the US in that period ~ but it was more than a trickle.
You have to evaluate what he says against an Israel time-line. It wasn't always the case that there were Russian Jews moving to Israel (for a recent example), or that the non-European component of the Jewish population was in the majority.
Re-reading what he said his statements appear to be consistent with the conditions on the ground in Europe in that period of time.
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