An Auschwitz anniversary

An Auschwitz Anniversary from the Warning Signs of Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

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There was some serious irony when U.S. Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew gathered together with French President Francois Hollande and a Russian delegation led by Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff, along with leaders from Germany and Austria to participate in the January 27th ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by Russian troops.

I suspect that an entire generation or two born after that year, 70 years ago, may have little or no knowledge of what Auschwitz was. It was a Nazi death camp located in Oswiecim, Poland. Its full name was Auschwitz-Birkenau and it is estimated that one million people, mostly Jews, were killed there.

I say “irony” because Auschwitz-Birkenau was part of a system of six Nazi death camps that included Belzac, Chelmo, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Each camp was filled with the victims of a widespread anti-Semitism that had existed in Europe for two thousand years, so it was not difficult for the Germans to turn a blind eye or the French and others to provide assistance in rounding up their Jews.

The camps engaged in large scale murder to fulfil Adolf Hitler’s intention to exterminate every Jew in Europe. In 1933 there had been nine million living in 21 nations that would be occupied during World War II. By 1945, two out of every three European Jews had been killed.

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In addition to the Jews, an estimated five million others deemed enemies of the state for political or other reasons such as being Communists, trade unionists, gypsies or homosexuals also died in the camps.

What is rarely acknowledged is that the Europeans of that era were largely educated, had a rich culture of music, literature, and drama, and many were church-goers. In short, you would not have been able to tell them apart from the Europeans of today.

The Nazis wrote the book on the use of terrorism to facilitate their barbaric, murderous theology of death. The Muslims that have moved to Europe have adapted it to their own ends, seeking like the Nazis to become globally dominant. They don’t have death camps—yet—but the widespread and constant slaughter in which they are engaged has a similar feel to it.

In the 1930s those European Jews had few places to which to flee. They were not even that welcome in America where anti-Semitism was widespread. Those that could did emigrate and, again there is irony because several of the German physicists that came to the U.S. were instrumental in the creation of the atomic bomb that ended World War II while others played roles in the Nazi’s defeat during the war. One such emigrant, Albert Einstein, was the first to suggest the creation of the weapon to Franklin Roosevelt.

In response to European anti-Semitism, a movement called Zionism had begun before World War II with the intention of reestablishing Israel as a Jewish state where Jews could be safe. The movement was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1896.

Here again there is irony because the movement was dominated by secular Jews who were not motivated by Jewish history or the Torah. What they wanted was to be free of the oppressive antipathy of the nations in which they lived. What they were seeking was emancipation.

By the time World War II occurred they were a force to be recognized in Israel, known at the time as the Palestinian Mandate and run by the British who, as often as not, shared the anti-Semitism that had given life to the Zionist movement.

It would take the Holocaust to accelerate the movement of Europe’s surviving Jews to Israel which in 1948 declared its sovereignty and was immediately attacked by the Muslim nations surrounding it.

Fast forward to our times and the Jews of Israel as well as those around the world know one truth. If Iran is permitted to reach a point where it can create its own nuclear weapons and put them on their missiles, Israel will only be minutes away from an extermination that the Iranian leadership and the other Muslim nations of the Middle East have openly called for since Israel came into being and the Islamic Revolution took control of Iran in 1979.

This time, however, the same nuclear weapons that would destroy Israel would also be turned on the United States because the shouts of “Death to America. Death to Israel” are a part of the daily lives of the Iranians, as well as others in the region.

What makes these days so dangerous is that the United States of America is engaged in negotiations with an Iran that has never made a secret of their intention to be a nuclear-armed nation. What makes these days so dangerous is that the President of the United States has barely hidden his own anti-Semitism and animus toward Israel.

One can only pray that seventy years hence some other writer will not be commenting on the second great annihilation of the Jews, literally within the lifetime of people who were alive during the first one.

I am one of those people and Auschwitz is not some place that existed a long time ago. It was yesterday.

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Celebrating Yom Kippur and Survival

Celebrating Yom Kippur and Survival from Warning Signs by Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

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If you want to know the depth of Islamic intolerance and, indeed, hatred of other religions then all you need do is think back to October 6, 1973 when Egypt and Syria joined together in a massive coordinated attack on Israel. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

Yom Kippur, this year, occurs on Friday, Oct 3, and one can only hope it does not become an occasion to attack Jews and their synagogues in the Middle East and throughout the rest of the world. Anti-Semitism is a global phenomenon, existing even in nations where Jews are hard to find. Those who track it say that it is increasing.

There are an estimated six million-plus Jews in the United States and a comparable number in Israel. There are approximately 14.8 million worldwide. By any comparison they represent a very small group, but in the minds of millions they are stereotyped as running the affairs of mankind. That’s insane, but rationality is rarely a factor when it comes to hating Jews.

In brief, the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, begins ten days in which the faithful are instructed to put their affairs in order, pay bills, and mend fences with those whom they have had disagreements or conflict. On Yom Kippur Jews seek God’s forgiveness and ask to be inscribed in the book of life for another year.

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If Yom Kippur is about one’s personal redemption and survival perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Judaism is the survival of this monotheistic faith, the bedrock of Christianity and, to a much smaller extent, Islam. Historically, it is some 3,000 years old.

Theologically, it has survived based on its Torah, otherwise known as the Old Testament, but the survival is one of generations of Jews who held onto their ancient faith, their covenant with God, in the face of oppression and death.

It apparently only takes a generation or two to forget the lessons of the past. In Germany, the anti-Semitism that fed the Holocaust that occurred during World War II has returned. As Benjamin Weinthal, a Research Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, put it, “With anti-Semitism on the march, Germany’s politicians and opinion makers are grappling with what went wrong with the country’s seven-decade-long struggle to come to terms with its past.”

Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has said “It is our national and civic duty to fight anti-Semitism” but Dieter Graumann, the president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, calls it “the worst of times since the Nazi era. On the streets, you hear things like ‘The Jews should be gassed.’ ‘The Jews should be burned.’”

A significant contributing factor to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe has been the influx of Muslims from Middle Eastern and African nations that now compose a large part of the population. A Jewish scholar and friend noted that “Norway’s last 819 Jews are now leaving the country. In a few weeks Norway will be ‘Judenrein’”, free of all Jews. Elsewhere the incidents of hatred and violence against Jews have occurred in France, the Netherlands, and Italy.

Muslim immigration to Great Britain has seen a comparable pattern and Jews have been emigrating from England as a result. In 1990 there were 340,000 Jews. Today there are 240,000. Islamic attacks on English citizens have become a factor and the recent beheading of a British citizen has finally awakened its government to the need for greater vigilance and action against attacks. The ISIS spokesman in a beheading video had a distinct British accent.

Even though there had been anti-Semitism in America, following the revelations of the Nazi Holocaust in the 1940s it dramatically receded. Wikipedia says: “According to surveys by the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitism is rejected by clear majorities of Americans, with 64% of them lauding Jews' cultural contributions to the nation in 2011, but a minority holding hateful views of Jews remain, with 19% of Americans supporting the anti-Semitic canard that Jews co-control Wall Street in 2011.

As well, Holocaust denial in recent years has been only a fringe phenomenon with less than ten percent of Americans expressing either opposition or ignorance to the historical record.”

In an August 18, 1790 letter responding to the good wishes sent him by the Hebrew congregation at Newport, George Washington said, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

American Jews will likely say a prayer of thanks for an America that has given them its protection. It is also likely that synagogues in our major and even smaller cities will have some measure of police protection on Friday. Like all Americans in the era of the Islamic State, they will need it.

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