US reluctant to step in vs. Syrian chemical threat, urges neighbors to cope

  DEBKAfile Special Report

 January 28, 2013

Strong reluctance to stepping in to prevent the use of Syria’s chemical weapons was registered by President Barack Obama in an interview Monday, Jan. 28 to The New Republic: “In a situation like Syria, I have to ask: can we make a difference in that situation?” He then continued to ask rhetoricalally: “Could it trigger even worse violence or the use of chemical weapons? What offers the best prospect of a stable post-Assad regime? And how do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in Congo?"
Apples and oranges, commented one Washington observer, after hearing President Obama’s queries.

The outcome of the Bashar Assad’s ruthless 22-month effort  backed by Iran and Hizballah at the cost of 80,000 lives will bear profoundly on the next stage of Middle East history, whereas the local conflict between the Katangan militia and Congolese army, however savage, will hardly determine the destiny of continental Africa.
Obama’s remarks appear in the context of a working paper submitted three days ago to US Navy commander, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, which reports that aircraft flying hours in the Middle East have been cut by more than half. Naval experts estimate that the real figure is closer to 70 percent.
A current photograph released by the US Navy shows most of the American aircraft carrier fleet including Marine craft anchored at dock in the United States empty of crews. This fits in with past DEBKAfile disclosures of the fact that the White House last month withdrew US aircraft carriers from Middle East, Red Sea, Persian Gulf and African waters.

On Monday, too, US Ambassador Dan Shapiro maintained in an Israel radio interview that the US and Israel were closely coordinated in all aspects for coping with security challenges in the region, including Syria’s chemical arsenals. He identified two potential dangers in this respect: the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people and their transfer to Hizballah or other extremist groups. “We are anxious to avert both these perils,” he stressed. “We are therefore keeping close watch on the situation and US and Israeli intelligence agencies are sharing data.
Israeli officials tended this week to radiate confidence that the United States would intervene militarily to foil the two threats. No such commitment, however, is even suggested in the US president’s comments. What they do convey is that Obama is concerned with juggling his global priorities for the US military as it shrinks under the knife of deep defense budget cutbacks.

Ambassador Shapiro’s words must therefore be seen as bromides;  certainly no commitment.
It fell to the retiring Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to put the situation on the table when he said candidly on Jan. 17: “The United States has quietly asked Turkey and Jordan to keep an eye on Syria’s chemical weaponry and to step in to take responsibility for the ordnance should the need arise.”
The onus for dealing with Assad’s chemical weapons has therefore been placed squarely on Turkish and Jordanian shoulders. Although Israel was not mentioned, it has been made clear that its defense forces face the same expectations from Washington as Syria’s other at-risk neighbors.

The Obama administration will confine US assistance to setting targets, providing intelligence and coordinating Israeli-Turkish-Jordanian military operations for taking control of the dangerous arsenal.  Two imponderables remain: What happens if Bashar Assad decides not just to move his chemical arsenal out of its secure sites into the wrong hands but to actually use it himself on a wide scale? And how will Tehran react to a combined Jordanian-Turkish-Israeli incursion of Syria after declaring Saturday that an attack on its ally would be deemed tantamount to an attack on Iran?

The Tomorrow's Borders of Israel - Mr. Naftali Bennett

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGS4EY0ddP0&feature=em-subs_digest-vrecs

Foundations of Holocaust:

 1924, Congress decides No More Jews

Published on JPost by David Turner on Thursday, 24 Jan, 2013

America's participation in the Holocaust actually became government policy in 1924 with near unanimous the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act (there were six nays). Its intent was, as demonstrated by its choice of the 1890 census over the 1910 census, was clearly to halt Jewish immigration (see below). Not that FDR could not have chosen to disregard the restriction when it became clear, nineteen years later, that Germany seriously intended to exterminate all Jews within reach. His willingness, under pressure, agreed to the creation of the War Refugee Board in late 1944, and even allowed a few thousand Jews to enter the US where they were interred in upstate New York. So, had the president the interest there were ways many more Jewish lives could have been saved.

In the end, as Germany actively promoted the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem, the United States, by remaining at the sidelines, was passively complicit in murder of six million European Jews.

“I think we now have sufficient population in our country for us to shut the door and to breed up a pure, unadulterated American citizenship,” Senator Ellison DuRant Smith in support of the Quota Act of 1921.

“Upon signing the [1924 Immigration Restriction] Act, President Calvin Coolidge commented, ‘America must remain American.’ 

Introduction: If Germany’s 1932 election of National Socialism threatened a “final solution” to the West’s pathological preoccupation with its Jewish Problem, America’s Congress ensured its near-success. 

The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the last in a decade’s long series of racist Congressional efforts to limit immigration of “undesirables” to the United States, to encourage immigration of “desired” North European Aryan “racial stock.” Before the 1924 Act Congress passed the not-quite-adequate Emergency Quota Act:

“The 1921 Emergency Quota Act restricted immigration to 3% of foreign-born persons of each nationality that reside[d] in theUnited States in 1910.”

What a difference three years of Congressional reflection makes: in 1910 (reflecting mass flight from Russian pogroms) Jews constituted some 2% of the population; in 1890 there were far fewer even than 1%. So the 1924 bill chose the 1890 census and for good measure  reduced the allowable quota of the “unfit” from 3% to 2%.:

“It initially permitted annual immigration of up to two percent of the number of foreign-born persons of a particular nationality in the United States as set forth in the 1890 census. In operation, the quota system "materially favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe because the great waves from Southern and Eastern Europe did not arrive until after 1890."” 

If the law sounds as if inspired by American eugenics, it was: it was based directly on testimony provided by the head of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO):

“Eugenics Record Office Superintendent Harry Laughlin became the anti-immigration movement's most persuasive lobbyist... [He was appointed by the chairman of the committee writing the law] expert eugenics agent.” By deceptive data and reasoning Laughlin fed Congress what it wanted to hear, that new immigrants were polluting America’s bloodline with “feeblemindedness, insanity, criminality, and dependency.” The resulting bill “did everything eugenicists had hoped for... it restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe countries to only 9% of the total. Northern and western European countries got 86% of the quota, even though they made up the minority of immigrants in 1923.”

President Coolidge signs the immigration act on the south lawn of the White House (Wikipedia)

“Upon signing the Act, President Calvin Coolidge commented, ‘America must remain American.’ This phrase would become the rallying cry of anti-immigration sentiment until after World War II.”

The degree of antisemitism inspiring the 1924 anti-immigrant Act accurately reflected the mood of the country. Eugenics, in the imagination of the United States, was the wave of the future.

In 1894, although the movement was still in its infancy, several Harvard graduates created the, Immigration Restriction Leaguededicated to preserving American racial purity by closing the gates to “inferior races.” Intent of preserving America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage as represented by its upper class, League membership included,

“A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, William DeWitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin College, James T. Young, director of Wharton School and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University.”

Antisemitism in America kept pace with the influx of Jews fleeing the pogroms. The great- grandson of Henry Adams, second president of the United States said,

““The Jew atmosphere isolates me.” In Ignatius Donnelly’s 1890-novel “Caesar’s Columns,” the Jews seized power to take revenge against the Christians for how they had made them suffer.”

Eugenics inspired such widely read scholarship as Madison Grant’s, The Passing of the Great Race which, in good eugenics terms, blamed the Jews for “mongrelizing” the white race.

This was also the period that produced the lynching of Leo Frank (longer discussion to come) and its defensive response to a spreading anti-Jewish threat, the Anti-defamation League for Jews; inspired by that lynch mob also the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that, within eight years grew from the few murderers of Leo Frank to a mass movement of more than four million by 1924:

“The Leo Frank case was a harbinger of an upsurge of overt Judeophobia after WW1. The artificial national unity was over, and postwar disillusionment brought during the 1920’s fear that the old way of life was under the onslaught of the foreign born, the city, and religious liberalism.”

In the 1920’s automobile magnate Henry Ford published and distributed millions of copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Harvard introduced a quota system for Jews, followed quickly by numerous institutions of higher education across the country (Dartmouth refused to abandon its quota until 1945); Jews were banished from white collar professions, including medicine, law and, ironically, banking.

Henry Ford distributed the Protocols at all dealerships across the U.S. His purchase of The Dearborn Independent allowed hit to spread antisemitism beyond the showroom.

Eugenics was the rage and sterilization was forced on tens of thousands of Americans that the US Supreme Court determined “unfit.” Adolph Hitler, already an admirer and promoter of the writings of Henry Ford held the United States a model for what Germany should aspire to:

 “When Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1924, he held up a foreign law as a model for his program of racial purification: The U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924… When the Nazis took power in 1933, they installed a program of eugenics--the attempted "improvement" of the population through forced sterilization and marriage controls--that consciously drew on the U.S. example... Small wonder that the Nazi laws led one eugenics activist in Virginia to complain, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."”

We will return in more detail to the impact of this restrictive immigration law on European Jewry when we turn to the Holocaust proper. One result rarely mentioned in histories of the Holocaust is that, beyond providing a fig leaf for the administration to justify its inaction responding to Germany’s ever-intensifying persecution of the Jews from 1933 on, the fact that the leading western democracy, self-described representative of humanistic and liberal ideals, “refuge to the oppressed;” the fact that the one country that might have provided a model of moral and ethical behavior in protecting Jewish refugees instead set an example for other potential countries of refuge to close their borders.

The single exception was tiny Bolivia, which accepted 30,000 refugees between 1938 and 1941.

Such theatrical gestures by the administration as the Bermuda Conference and that “too little-too late” afterthought, the War Refugee Board, were mere window dressing to placate critics at home, and particularly America’s own and mostly impotent Jewish community itself fearing antisemitism at home.

Postscript: The antisemitic 1924 Congressional Act remained in force until 1965, long after the Final Solution eliminated the threat of a “massive” Jewish immigration had passed. In the meantime the Congressional ban was scrupulously observed, and its surviving Jewish victims, approximately one million, were forced by the US Army to remain in the same concentration camps renamed DP camps, from which they had recently been “liberated,” American soldiers as guards at the same camps they had suffered under German rule!

Three years after Auschwitz the United States was still imprisoning Jews while providing sanctuary from the Nuremberg Trials for “useful” Nazi war criminals like SS colonel Werner von Braun. Sanctuary for Nazis, concentration camps for Jews.

Recent writings in this Series: 

1. Foundations of Holocaust: Corporate America, camp inmates and slave labor

2. Foundations of Holocaust: Corporate America and the Fuhrer, a Love Story

3. Foundations of Holocaust: a two-thousand year long Jewish Problem

4. Foundations of Holocaust: American eugenics and the Nazi connection

The Palestinian Wall of Lies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByMufgpcdnI&feature=endscreen

Debunking the Palestine Lie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ByJb7QQ9U&feature=em-subs_digest-vrecs

January 23, 2013 Israelis voted for reality BY DAVID SUISSA http://www.jewishjournal.com/ david_suissa/article/israelis_voting_for_reality_on_election_day/

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his office in Jerusalem on Jan. 23. Photo by Darren Whiteside/Reuters Regardless of what kind of coalition a bruised and humbled Prime Minister Netanyahu shapes in the new government, the prospects for peace will depend less on his government’s actions and more on the sentiments of Israel’s neighborhood. To get a sense of those sentiments, consider the words of newly elected President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, a country that is technically “at peace” with Israel and is critical to its security. As reported in The New York Times, three years ago Morsi was caught on video at a rally urging his followers to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews,” whom later that year he described as “bloodsuckers,” “warmongers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.” Morsi is far from the exception in his Jew-hatred. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, wrote in The Times: “All over the Middle East, hatred for Jews and Zionists can be found in textbooks for children as young as three, complete with illustrations of Jews with monster-like qualities. Mainstream educational television programs are consistently anti-Semitic. In songs, books, newspaper articles and blogs, Jews are variously compared to pigs, donkeys, rats and cockroaches, and also to vampires and a host of other imaginary creatures.” The vile depiction of Jews and Zionists is especially prevalent in Palestinian society, something that has been exposed in detail by the group Palestinian Media Watch. It is this vicious Jew-hatred, above all, that has killed every hope for peace. As Ali writes: “So many explanations have been offered for the failure of successive U.S. administrations to achieve that peace, but the answer is in Morsi’s words. Why would one make peace with bloodsuckers and descendants of apes and monkeys?” Israelis are not stupid. They read all this stuff. They haven’t given up on peace, but they’ve given up on peace illusions. The conventional wisdom before Election Day was that Israel is “moving right.” As I see it, it is reality that has moved right, and Israel has had no choice but to adapt. Ever since the heady days of Oslo 20 years ago, Israelis have gotten burned whenever they stuck their collective necks out for peace. They saw how all the years and hopes they invested in Yasser Arafat were wasted on a duplicitous conniver who launched a terror war that murdered a thousand Israelis; they saw how terror rockets were launched on Israeli civilians after they evacuated Lebanon and Gaza; and now they see their so-called “peace partner” Mahmoud Abbas trying to make peace with Hamas, a terror entity sworn to Israel’s destruction. Israelis see an Arab Spring that has generated even more Jew-hatred and even worse conditions for peace. When they look east, they see an Iranian madman building a nuclear arsenal to wipe Israel off the map. And when they look north, they count their blessings that they never gave up the Golan Heights to a murderous despot now fighting a horrendous civil war. Simply put, Israelis have come to understand that no amount of concessions or settlement freezes or red-carpet summits will thaw the icy Jew-hatred that lies at the core of the conflict. They’ve come to understand the perverted and ruthless logic of the Middle East: The more you want peace and show weakness, the more you get war. The more desperate you appear for a solution, the further you get from it. Many American Jews are perplexed and exasperated that Israel has not been more “practical” or done “whatever it takes” to get their enemies to come to the peace table. They assume that the more you push for something, the better your chances of getting it. They can’t see how “dig in and tough it out” can even be an option. What they’ve missed is that, in recent years, Israel has taken on a very Middle Eastern attribute: patience. Essentially, Israel has been telling the Arab and Muslim world: We’ve waited 2,000 years to come home, and we’re ready to wait another 2,000 years to make peace. Whenever you’re ready to accept us, we’ll be here, ready to talk peace. In the Middle East, patience is leverage. Patience itself is a very centrist idea. It avoids the extremes of both sides. Bibi is fortunate that a centrist party, Yesh Atid, has done remarkably well. This will help him shape a more reality-based coalition. This reality cuts both ways. On the one hand, it means recognizing that Israel must eventually make peace with its neighbors, and never lose hope. On the other, it means recognizing that if the conditions are not ripe for peace, pushing too hard actually can backfire. Let’s hope that Bibi’s new coalition will be able to pull off that balancing act: to show the world that Israel is absolutely ready to make peace, while exercising the hard-nosed realism that the neighborhood demands. Israelis have learned the hard way that pushing for peace with those who hate you can bring you further from peace, and that showing weakness with those who compare you to pigs and apes can be an invitation to another war. David Suissa is president of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal and can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com.

© Copyright 2013 Tribe Media Corp. All rights reserved. JewishJournal.com is hosted by Nexcess.net. Homepage design by Koret Communications. Widgets by Mijits. Site construction by Hop Studios.

Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon (REVIEW)     Edward Alexander  JANUARY 22, 2013 

Antisemitism:  A Specific Phenomenon, by Clemens Heni (Berlin: Edition Critic, 2013).  A publication of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.

“As time went on … the Nazis not only became the source of power and wealth and the seekers after Germany’s greatness, but also learned how to handle footnotes and quotations…Hitler was aware of the necessity of presenting anti-Jewish ideology in a scholarly coating.…By 1935 he had succeeded. Within a few years, the fight against the Jews was no more confined to shabby tracts by unknown authors; it had made its entrance into the respectable academic world of Germany.”

- Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors (YIVO/Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946).

Clemens Heni is a young German scholar who has undertaken the Herculean task of throwing back the assault on Holocaust memory that is currently carried on “mostly in the ivory towers of esoteric academia” by activist professors (who demonstrate the explosive power of boredom). Himself a PhD in political science from Innsbruck and currently Director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Heni pays particular attention to the ignorance as well as tendentiousness of the learned. “We are currently facing a …movement around the globe to distort the history of the Second World War and to deny the uniqueness and unprecedented character of the Holocaust…. Many scholars…seem to have a clear mission: universalizing the Holocaust and denying its specific anti-Jewish character.” Heni shows, in this vast and discriminating critical survey of the campaign to make murdered European Jews into metaphors for both humanity in general and Palestinian Arabs in particular, that it would be dangerous to think of academics as harmless drudges who know so much about so little that they cannot be contradicted, nor are worth contradicting. Drudges they may be; harmless they are not. Their aims are not scholarly, but political—and often murderous.

Professors did not always take the lead in the campaign to make the Holocaust an assault not on Jews but on “humanity in general,” and eventually to reinvent the Palestinian Arabs as Jews and give them a free ride on the coattails of Jewish suffering. In 1979 I published an essay in several newspapers entitled “Stealing the Holocaust,” in which the 1956 dramatization by Francis and Albert Hackett of “The Diary of Anne Frank”—which is probably known to more people than any other literary or historical work on the Holocaust—was my most prominent example of de-Judaizing the Holocaust. Under the influence of Lillian Hellman, the Hacketts had expunged from the stage version all of Anne’s references to her hopes for survival in a Jewish homeland and changed her specific allusions to her Jewish identity to a blurred, amorphous universalism. In the diary Anne had written: “If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English…we will always remain Jews.” In the stage version, this became “We are not the only people that’ve had to suffer…sometimes one race, sometimes another.” This flummery no doubt helped at the box office; but for every lie a price must be paid, though not always by the liars. Not long afterward, part of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam was used as a PLO “Information” Center, in which Anne’s suffering and horrible death were made prelude to the “Auschwitz” of the Arab refugee camps.

But even in the seventies the academic revisionists were busily at work, though not yet as central to the enterprise of turning the Holocaust into a calamity in prospect for just about everybody—except, of course, the Jews themselves. In 1977 the Czech-born Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer delivered a ringing denunciation of the historians who were denying the Holocaust “in a more refined way than in the openly Nazi literature.” In “Against Mystification” (a lecture subsequently published in The Holocaust in Historical Perspective) Bauer insisted, and demonstrated, that “Hitler’s war of conquest was ideologically a war against the Jews….The basic aim of Hitler was always the struggle against the Jews. To befog this issue is to misunderstand the whole historical processs….The revisionist intellectuals, from A. J. P. Taylor through [Geoffrey] Barraclough, Werner Maser, and Joachim Fest in Germany, and the many others who seem to be jumping onto this particular bandwagon, have created the preconditions for a rehabilitation of Nazism and…a linkup between revisionist history and neo-Nazi pseudoscientific gutter history.” As I listened to Bauer’s eloquent and impassioned lecture—to an overflow audience of 500 people at the University of Washington—I thought, complacently, that he had finished off the campaign to deny that Hitler’s war had been a war against the Jews. Of course I was wrong: “Everything,” Proust once wrote, “has already been said, but since nobody pays attention, it must be repeated every morning.” By now, in fact, so many have jumped onto this “bandwagon” that not a single one of the culprits mentioned by Bauer appears in Heni’s 61 page bibliography or 43-page index.

What Heni provides, relentlessly, is a huge taxonomy of contemporary antisemitism, with special emphasis on those types that derive from the assault on Holocaust memory through universalization, trivialization, anti-capitalism, fanatical anti-Zionism, and a bizarre kind of envy. At universities this sometimes takes the form of rejecting Holocaust studies as a specific field of teaching and research because study of the specific murder of Jews—so its detractors allege–impedes the general understanding of genocide, unbalances our moral sense, and makes us insensitive to other victims of mass murder. Why this problem doesn’t arise for courses on slavery or the treatment of American Indians is not explained. At other times the emphasis is on numbers (very much in the manner of Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times, for whom everything is “a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic”: since the Jews “were fewer than one percent of the German population when Hitler became chancellor…and about one quarter of one percent by the beginning of the Second World War…and most of the German Jews who saw Hitler win elections in 1933 died of natural causes,” why, asks one scholar, all the disproportionate kerfuffle about Hitler and Jews and Auschwitz? And so on and on ad nauseam, until all the spiteful questions combine into one: “How dare the Jews monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering, which other groups would very much like, ex post facto, to share?” The tone of much of this professorial polemic against Holocaust scholarship and memory has been described by Alvin Rosenfeld, in his indispensable book The End of the Holocaust, as “introducing a rhetoric of aggression against Jews that until now has rarely been seen outside of antisemitic literature.”

According to Heni, “the godfather of all kinds of universalization of the Holocaust” is Martin Heidegger, who in 1949 observed that “Agriculture is nowadays a motorized nutritional industry, by nature the same as the production of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and the starving out of countries, the same as the production of the H-bomb.” In case anybody has forgotten, Heidegger is the German philosopher who on April 10, 1933, acting in his capacity as rector of the University of Fribourg, had instructed his deans to dismiss all faculty members of Jewish religion or origin. A philosopher of world renown (as he remains to this day), he announced that this action helped to demonstrate that “the National Socialist revolution …means a complete revolution of our German existence…Hail Hitler.” (Well, perhaps not quite complete, because Heidegger, a married man, was at this very time busy seducing a Jewish undergraduate half his age named Hannah Arendt. One wonders how much of their pillow talk concerned his April dismissal of his Jewish colleagues.)

This foundational statement of Holocaust “universalization,” intended to make “modernity” rather than the Third Reich guilty of Germany’s crimes, helps to explain why Heidegger was fond of saying that “He who thinks greatly must err greatly.” Like the rest of the myriad of academics who inhabit Max Weinreich’s great book about how “Hitler’s Professors” made antisemitism academically respectable and complicit in the murder of Jews, Heidegger played a key role in making the Third Reich the first regime in history—as the political philosopher Leo Strauss observed in 1962–“based on no principle other than the negation of Jews.” This fact alone should render all denials of the specificity of the Holocaust nugatory—with one exception, which happens to be the very one that the deniers cannot admit, i.e, a similarity not between European Jews and Palestinian Arabs but between Palestinian Arabs and the Nazis. The Third Reich was the first regime in history to define itself entirely by negation of Jews, but by no means the last. A glance at most Palestinian calendars or at the Hamas Charter will readily confirm that Israel faces an enemy that bases its whole identity, including holidays, slogans, domestic and foreign policies, upon the prospect of destroying its Jewish neighbor. (Article Seven of The Hamas Charter reads as follows: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”)

Edward Alexander’s most recent book is The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers).