Posted on 04/27/2017 4:41:12 AM PDT by SJackson
Typically, when one asks a Democrat about FDR they immediately develop a sense of awe that reminds me of those little green aliens (undocumented space men?) in Toy Story every time they see Buzz Lightyear.” AHHHHH!”
I’ve never understood the reverence for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He gets points for picking great Generals and led this country to victory in WWII. But he totally mismanaged the economy, making the great depression longer…in 1937 unemployment spiked again reaching 19% (the previous high was 25%), his freedom-sapping policies never did get this country out of the Great Depression, and don’t forget that he tried to circumvent constitutional separation of powers (now who does that remind me of?). And then there is the issue never discussed, he was a bigot, his hatred of Jews caused hundreds thousands to be added to the ranks of Hitler’s victims.
Winston Churchill’s appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs doomed tens of thousands more.
Some point to the fact he didn’t he bomb and destroy the train tracks that were shipping Jews to the concentration camps? But my opinion sides with the people who say that wouldn’t have worked. The real question to be explored was why didn’t allow more Jews into the country and why didn’t he pressure Britain to allow Jews to move from Nazi controlled areas into what was then called Palestine?
In the book “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith,” historian Rafael Medoff suggests that Roosevelt failed to take relatively simple measures that would have saved significant numbers of Jews during the Holocaust, because his vision for America was one that had a small number of Jews. In other words, FDR doomed many Jew to suffer not because he wanted them to die, but because he didn’t want a lot of them living in his neighborhood.
In a piece for the Brandies Center, Medoff shared some of the hateful/public anti-Semitic statements Roosevelt made when he let his guard down:
In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon.
In 1938, he privately suggested that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were therefore to blame for provoking anti-Semitism there. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon. In 1943, he told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions “should be definitely limited” so as to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.”
In 1936, he characterized a tax maneuver by the publisher of the New York Times as “a dirty Jewish trick.” 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 1939, Roosevelt expressed (to a U.S. senator) his pride that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins.” In 1940, he dismissed pleas for Jewish refugees as “Jewish wailing” and “sob stuff.” In 1941, President Roosevelt remarked at a cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon.
The most detailed of FDR’s statements about Jews was made during his meeting on January 17, 1943, in Casablanca, with leaders of the new local regime in Allied-liberated North Africa. U.S. ambassador Robert Murphy remarked that the 330,000 Jews in North Africa were “very much disappointed that ‘the war for liberation’ had not immediately resulted in their being given their complete freedom.”
(Before the war, when the Jews lived under the colonial French regime, they enjoyed rights similar to French citizens. But when the pro-Nazi Vichy French took over the French colonies in 1940, they stripped Jews of those rights. In 1943, upon the defeat of the Vichyites, the Jews had expected their rights would be restored.)
According to the official record of the conversation (later published by the U.S. government in its ‘Foreign Relations of the United States’ series), the president replied that “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,” which “would not permit them to overcrowd the professions.”
FDR explained that his plan “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.” (It is not clear where FDR obtained those wildly inflated statistics.)
Perhaps his distaste for Jews was the reason, that while there were many actions FDR could have taken to stop or slow down the Holocaust, he didn’t. “He could have quietly permitted the immigration quotas to be filled to their legal limit — that alone would have saved 190,000 lives,” Medoff said.
“He could have pressed the British to open Palestine’s doors to Jewish refugees. He could have authorized the use of empty troop-supply ships to bring refugees to stay in the U.S. temporarily, until the end of the war. He could have permitted refugees to stay as tourists in a U.S. territory, such as the Virgin Islands, until it was safe for them to return to Europe. He could have authorized the bombing of Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to it, which would have interrupted the mass-murder process.”
Asked to respond to the argument that it was better for Roosevelt to focus on winning the war than divert resources to bomb Auschwitz, Medoff said “[b]ombing Auschwitz would not have required any diversion of resources, because U.S. planes were already bombing targets that were less than five miles from the gas chambers, during the summer and autumn of 1944.”
It really goes beyond that. FDR was reluctant to speak out against the impending genocide
On August 25, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt brought her friend Alice Hamilton, who had recently spent three months in Germany, to Hyde Park to give FDR a detailed eyewitness account of German brutality against the Jews. He still refused to publicly criticize Hitler.
On Roosevelt’s most blatant acts of bigotry involved the St. Louis whose story was recently explained at Constitution.com
On May 13, 1939, the St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, to Cuba with 937 Jewish refugees on board. Captain Gustav Schroder, a non-Jewish German, was determined to rescue these men, women and children from Nazi Germany. To his dismay, he was forced to return 907 passengers to Europe, landing in Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17, 1939.
Four months before Hitler invaded Poland, officially starting World War II, Jews were fleeing Germany by the thousands. Captain Schroder agreed to take a shipload on his luxury cruise liner to Cuba. Shortly before leaving, he was informed Cuba rejected most of the visas issued to his passengers. He left with them anyway, praying for a miracle.
(…) Upon arrival at Cuba, the St. Louis was not allowed to dock. Captain Schroder worked for a week in vain to allow his passengers to disembark. He was denied. Only 22 Jewish refugees were allowed entry as they did have acceptable passage, along with four Spanish citizens and two Cuban nationals. One gentleman, so distraught over returning to Nazi Germany, attempted suicide. He was taken to a hospital in Havana for treatment for his wounds.
Captain Schroder turned to America, pleading to President Franklin D. Roosevelt for help. Claims of improper paperwork, German Jewish immigration quotas and national security were given as excuses for rejecting the passengers. Afraid Schroder would run his ship ashore in Florida, forcing America to accept the refugees, the Coast Guard was sent to watch the St. Louis as it sailed close to our shores.
Finding no help anywhere in North America, Schroder was forced to return to Europe. Determined to be the liberator of his remaining 907 passengers (as one person died during the voyage), Schroder refused to return his ship to Germany until all the refugees were given protection in other countries. The United States finally stepped in and helped secure those arrangements in European countries.
Once those agreements for asylum were made, Captain Schroder docked his boat in Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17th. The United Kingdom accepted 288 passengers while France welcomed 224, Belgium accepted 214, and the Netherlands received 181. In less than a year, Hitler invaded Belgium and France in May of 1940, again threatening those refugees who for a moment had a taste of true freedom. It is estimated that 254 of the 907 returned to Europe were victims of the Holocaust, loosing their lives in concentration or internment camps.
When Hitler came into power in Germany there was a large increase in the demand for Jewish immigration to Palestine as Jews tried to escape. The British allowed around 50,000 Jews to immigrate from 1934-1936 but it infuriated the Arab population.Based on the higher immigration levels the Arabs started the an intifada against the Palestinian Jews. The Arab attacks continued for three years (1936-1939). Britain did take a stab at limiting the Arab attacks, but it was more important to keep the Arabs from jumping to the German side. So they began the British tradition of appeasing Palestinian terrorists, that exists even today. Their solution was the White Paper of 1939.
The White Paper limited the immigration of Jews to Palestine which resulted in the death sentence. A limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the five-year period 1940-1944, consisting of a regular yearly quota of 10,000, and a supplementary quota of 25,000, spread out over the same period, to cover refugee emergencies. After this cut-off date, further immigration would depend on the permission of the Arabs . Restrictions were also placed on the rights of Jews to buy land from Arabs—a restriction that President Obama tried to duplicate.
Today, Yom HaShoah we remember the horror of the Holocaust. It is sad to consider that partly because of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Antisemitism, and Winston Churchill’s appeasement, innocent people who could have been saved were instead abandoned.
If you'd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
..................
I suspect the number of Jews who could have fled or been relocated to Israel over nearly a decade would have exceeded 200,000. It's also worth noting that it was the UK's obligation to resettle Jews in the Jewish Homeland. A charge they accepted from the League of Nations and which they failed in at the cost of many lives.
I do think the author is correct that Churchill's motivation was political, FDR's antisemitism. Jews in Israel would not subvert American culture as Jews developing the atomic bomb presumably did.
As to FDR's support for restricting Jewish employment in professional positions in North Africa, it's interesting to note that the Sultan of Morocco refused to do the same thing under pressure from Vichy.
You Must Remember This: Sultan of Morocco Mohammed V protected the Jews of Casablanca.
I honestly just don’t “get” antisemitism.
why would anyone “hate” the jews?
why? what do they do to anyone? so ... we disagree on exactly who Jesus was.. big deal!
dig deep enough and you disagree with everyone on just about anything!
They are usually productive citizens who are not prone to violence or crime. They don’t “push” their religion on anyone. In fact, for the most part they just seem to keep to themselves for the most part trying to live their lives the best they can.
What the heck!?
So true.
http://www.martingilbert.com/blog/winston-churchill-and-the-foundation-of-israel
https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/03/09/yes-churchill-really-was-a-friend-of-jews-and-zionism/
From the second link:
After the War Cabinet overrode Churchill by deciding to discourage illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine, Churchill devised a policy that bypassed it, by permitting all Jews who might arrive in Palestine to stay there. One result was that, in early 1944, 6,000 Jews from Romania and Bessarabia were permitted to proceed to Palestine on British passports.
and
Indeed, such was the perception of Churchill’s solicitude for Jews among officials that, on at least two occasions, callous members of his own inner staff withheld from him Jewish requests out of fear that he would respond positively to them.
Churchill in his personal sentiment was a Semito-phile (did I just invent a word?). On the other hand, though he was reluctant to sign the White Paper, and railed against it while an MP, in the end he did so, and instructed the Foreign Office to enforce it rigorously, using lend-lease equipment from the US meant to fight Hitler.
The Moroccan royal family has been a friend to Jews for centuries.
One my political epiphamys happened when the FDR memorial was being planned. I realised that leftists see others, even their own as only a way to further a political cause. There was a huge debate about whether he should be depicted in a wheelchair, centered around what would benefit this or that cause. Not once did I hear any concern about what FDR would have wanted.
I have a theory.Satan loves to see as many dead Jews as possible.The Jews are God’s chosen people and as such receive a special level of wrath from the devil.He manipulates people like Roosevelt to get the highest body count possible.
In the context of the US Congress moving to cut off immigration of Jews into the US (under the GOP) beginning shortly after WWI, FDR’s actions shouldn’t be a surprise.
Second-guessing is too easy. Putting America first should be the instinct of American political leaders.
This is just progressivism at work. This is who progressives are.
I’m with you guys. The Jews I know and have worked with are bright, hard working and have a good sense of humor and in most cases are not arrogant but quite humble about their acievements.
Most were scientists and engineers and we got along well. We were even able to discuss my Christian religion and theirs openly and honestly.
I don’t get the hate.
That being said, the Northeastern establishment of that era was uncomfortable with the social advancement of Jews and, to a lesser extent, Catholics. FDR remarked to Leo Crowley, an Irish Catholic who was the chairman of the FDIC, that Catholics and Jews existed in America at the sufferance of the Protestant majority. The Wall Street financial powers that be allowed a Jewish-owned bank, the Bank of the United States, fail even as they helped other financial institutions in liquidity crises. The Northeastern elite were willing to have Catholic dominated political machines control the large cities and to have Jews enter retail businesses and the professions, so long as their suburban and central city enclaves, their private schools, Ivy League Colleges, and their corporate and financial interests remained in their hands.
That world was the one from which FDR came. They were uncomfortable with Jews and Catholics on a social level, but they were not driven to master race beliefs or fantasies about Jesuit or Zionist plots.
JEWS ARE LIBERTY HATING SOCIALISTS
90% of Jews vote Big Government leftist socialism.
No group should be murdered but groups behavior should be held accountable. South America is a better fit for socialists, not the USA.
That is just the facts.
Apologists say that sometimes ‘only’ 75% of Jews now are socialists. Only 75% socialist! AAHHH!
It has NOTHING to do with Christ or God.
When Jews turns it around and 3/4 vote pro liberty, then bring them in. But liberty lovers do need some place on this Earth free of socialists.
About Churchill: Here are a couple of more quotes from the link I posted above:
● As First Lord of the Admiralty (1939-40), Churchill instructed Royal Navy vessels not to intercept ships suspected of bringing illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine.
● In February 1942, Churchill argued successfully in the War Cabinet — and in the face of opposition from the new Colonial Secretary, Lord Moyne — to release from internment approximately 800 Jewish refugees from the Darien II, who had reached Palestine.
● That same year, Churchill overrode Foreign Office objections to a proposal for permitting 5,000 Bulgarian Jewish children to travel to Palestine. (The War Cabinet approved, but the move was blocked by German pressure applied on Bulgaria).
But the British FO and the Secret Service were ever since oil became important for the RN very Arabophile. That together with the "social Antisemitism" (see Wallace T, post 12) of the British establishment made it very hard for Churchill to push through his pro-Jewish policy.
Lots of minority groups vote in mass for Democrats. That is not what I am talking about.
I am talking about the long history of hatred for the Jews. Not just in the US but worldwide.
It honestly (to me) makes no sense what-so-ever.
Why hate the Jews more than, say... Hindu’s ? Hindu’s are FAR further from Christianity than Judaism, and yet... I see no historical hatred of the Hindu’s. No effort to wipe Hindu’s off the face of the Earth, ect.
It has to be something else besides the religious disagreement.
Are people jealous? is it a class envy thing? like the poor here in America hate the rich in general? are people put off by their tendency to be sort of clickish?
Yeah I get that many here in America are mad that the Jews support liberals mostly.. but so do the blacks, and I don’t see anyone advocating the killing of all blacks because most vote democratic.
You have to read the folks who were anti-Semitic and the periods in which they lived to understand it. Not modern sources that present comic book explanations, but the actual texts written at the time to understand how such occured. Further to understand why particular hate arose, you must understand why folks saw Jews as threats, which you will not get unless you read both sides of the conflict and try to look at the world they way they did, rather than the modern American mind set.
Oddly enough once you see the pattern once, you will see the same pattern repeat again and again throughout history, though the exact timeline and final outcome varies somewhat.
Three easily researched periods and one less easy but given the current middle east situation worth understanding.:
Northern Germany 1638 to 1945 (special attention to 1916 to 1945):
England 1066 to 1290 (special attention paid to 1215 to 1290)
Poland 1085 to 1795, there are actually many cycles in that time, each one getting worse for the Jews but very instructive, as golden ages such as 1264 to 1295, 1332 to 1349 and 1385 to 1407 alternated with periods of repression due to various reasons.
Persia: 722 BC to 323 BC (special attention to 530 to 432 BC) The Persian sources are hard to find in English, but if you try hard enough you can find them on the net.
I did a little research based on your recommendations and I think I understand the origin of the hatred a little better.
Basically it mostly stims from usury.
And the poor Jews got a two fer from it.
The church taught that usury was sinful from the pews, and it’s fairly normal to resent those you owe money too.
Since Jews were the only group basically allow to charge interest they got despised by both groups. Plus killing the person you owe money or driving them out of town, ect has the benefit of wiping out your debt!
It’s no wonder in hindsight why the Jews have been so singled out for hatred as compared to other groups.
Thanks for the information.
Every bomb dropped with the goal of slowing Auschwitz would be a bomb diverted from winning the war.
Also, it was not just a matter of "OK, today we'll bomb Auschwitz, tomorrow we'll get back to bombing refineries, or factories, or whatever". It was not unheard-of to lose 20% of the attacking bombers in a single mission.
So then the Struma was quarantined, towed out to sea and possibly deliberately sunk over Churchill’s objections? It seems there was a large intra-cabinet rift that the government was actively ignoring.
The US war aims in Europe had nothing to do with the Jews, whether they were saved or weren’t was a matter of indifference to the administration, and to accuse FDR of failing to do something that he had no responsibility for and no interest in is extreme post hoc argumentation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.