NONSENSE: Refugees from Terror-Prone Countries Not Comparable to Holocaust Refugees

By Jeff Dunitz, THE LID

NONSENSE: Refugees from Terror-Prone Countries Not Comparable to Holocaust Refugees

President Trump on Friday signed sweeping new orders tightening refugee and visa policies including suspending almost all refugee admissions for four months and indefinitely barring entry for some Syrians. Trump said the new measure was intended “to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America.” The executive order also suspends visa entry into the U.S. from seven terror-prone countries: Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Sudan and Yemen.

Liberals of course are going crazy. They say that Trump created this order because he is Islamophobic. They’ve even come up with a ridiculous comparison, “Anne Frank was a refugee also.” Indeed she was, but the reason for Trump’s action was totally different from the reason Anne Frank and many like her were prevented from coming to the US.

Trump’s executive action was made to prevent terrorists from coming into the United States. FDR prevented refugees from coming into this country because they were Jewish and he thought America didn’t need any more Jews.

In June 2016 then CIA Director Brennan said during congressional hearings that one of the ways terrorists infiltrate western nations is by embedding themselves within groups of refugees.

Brennan explained that ISIL has been recruiting and training westerners to infiltrate their countries of birth and commit terrorist acts. Interestingly, he identifies refugee flows as one of the ways terrorists can infiltrate. That seems to suggest that the United States needs to be very careful who it lets into the country, “which hasn’t been a priority for this administration, but there seems to be one presidential candidate who wants to put a temporary stop to immigration from certain countries that house radical Islamic I mean international terrorists.”

And the group is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including refugee flows, smuggling routes, and legitimate methods of travel. Further, as we have seen in Orlando, San Bernardino, and elsewhere, ISIL is attempting to inspire attacks by sympathizers who have no direct links to the group. Last month, for example, a senior ISIL figure publicly urged the group’s followers to conduct attacks in their home countries if they were unable to travel to Syria and Iraq.

President Trump’s action delays acceptance of refugees until the DHS can figure out how to ensure they’ve kept the embedded terrorists from hiding within the crowds of legitimate refugees. His motivation is to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States.

In the case of the Holocaust, the Nazi’s weren’t embedding themselves with the Jewish refugees. It wasn’t even suspected. The Jewish refugees were kept out because FDR was a bigot, his hatred of Jews caused thousands to be added to the ranks of Hitler’s victims.

Some point to the fact FDR didn’t bomb and destroy the train tracks that were shipping Jews to the concentration camps. Others say that bombing wouldn’t have prevented anything. The real question needing to be explored is why didn’t FDR 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 Jews to suffer not because he wanted them to die, but because he didn’t want more Jews living in his neighborhood.

In a piece for the Brandeis Center, Medoff shared some of the hateful/public anti-Semitic statements Roosevelt made when he let his guard down: 

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, one of the era’s most prominent American Jewish leaders, 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  told by Pamela Adams 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.

Today the liberals are screaming that any delay or extreme vetting of refugees from those terror-prone countries is an act of Islamophobia, even though CIA Director Brennan said during congressional testimony that refugee flows is one the ways terrorists infiltrate western nations. They are even trying to make the ignorant comparisons between the situation delaying the acceptance of refugees from the terror-prone countries and the barring of refugees from Hitler.

The reason for the delay, announced Friday, was to protect American lives. The Holocaust refugees were kept out because of the bigotry of liberal hero FDR that caused approximately 200K extra Jews die in the Holocaust, because he didn’t want more Jews living in America.

Bottom line: it is pure nonsense, an intellectually dishonest — or at least ignorant — argument to compare the two groups of refugees or the belief systems of the two presidents.

January 28, 2017 | 12 Comments »

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12 Comments / 12 Comments

  1. @ Robin Rosenblatt:

    There a few more of us who understand this is an Imperialist ideology claiming to be a ‘religion’ let alone a ‘religion of of peace’, without ever reading Geller or Spencer.

    Graduate course in Political Islam was very enlightening, taken in 2005, before the Age of Deplorables.

    I am still staying Anonymous…

  2. “…Many parents said it is their faith that led them to oppose Trump. “We teach our children from a very young age that we were strangers in Egypt and have an obligation to help a stranger wherever they are. The rhetoric on immigrants and refugees is gravely concerning from a Jewish perspective, and not just refugees and immigrants, but also the rhetoric on the LGBTQ community, minorities, and persecuted and vulnerable communities, period.” …”
    http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/news/a9392/arabella-kushner-washington-school/

    Even 5-year-old Arabella Kushner is at risk at her new school, Jewish Primary Day School!

    Town & Country magazine is owned by Hearst, and all the Hearst magazines are covering the Trump family as human beings.

    Conde Nast: Vanity Fair and the New Yorker are still spinning trash lies to demonize all of the Trumps..

    This is Im-moral ‘Moral Equivalence’. Citing the Exodus out of Egypt, American Jews are leading the protests of ‘islamophobia’ over T45’s EO ban on refugee visas from these islamic nations.

    The same Jews who care more about being seen as liberal than actually being mensches.

    Comment triggered by seeing rep Nadler, d, Upper West Side Manhattan, leading the protest at JFK today. Nadler is probably hoping to replace the Jews of Borough Park (part of which is in Nadler’s CD10 with muslims.

    Last night, I realized the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn are at high risk of attacks and abuse by this far-left Democratic Party and their thugs.

    this is all so dreadful.

  3. A lot of Jews are ignorant about Islam and so are many Americans. If I count those Americans and Jews who do understand, there are 5, 6 or 7 of us in America. There is Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer. Bill Warner and myself thatn 4. There must be a few more but I can not think of their names. That is out of how many American? 318.9 million?

  4. @ Sebastien Zorn:

    More on: Muslims coming here is not the same as Jews coming here.

    Among those Fry rescued were Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, Alma Mahler, Pablo Casals, Wanda Landowska, Arthur Koestler.

    (cont.) By contrast, Sayyid Qutb visited here, in the 1940’s as a student, and was so disgusted with America, he went back and founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb

    My only concern is that the ban is temporary. We should allow no more Muslims in. Ever. Those who are here need to be watched and vetted. It’s a fascist ideology. Saying, “moderate muslim” is like saying “moderate fanatic”. Did you see that the mullah that President Trump picked for his inauguration spoke Jihadist code words?

    https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/01/imam-at-trumps-prayer-service-recited-quranic-condemnation-of-jews-and-christians

    remember this?

    “A true American “moderate” Muslim beheads wife”
    (Bill Maher interviewing Brigitte Gabriel)
    https://youtu.be/NpMPz9JF5b8

  5. @ Sebastien Zorn:
    (cont.) Not to put too fine a point on it, FDR forced Varian Fry to come home job unfinished at the beginning of the Shoah.

    “Varian Fry led the effort to save Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and thousands of other European intellectuals from the Nazis. Why was he forgotten?”

    http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/88130/the-rescuer

    He only set up the War Refugee Board in 1944, which sponsored Wallenberg but was only able to rescue and give refuge to about a thousand Jews, because his re-election was threatened by revolt within his own cabinet — Secretary of Finance Morgenthau threatened to expose him — and the Republican Party’s embrace of Emergency Rescue and Zionism in its platform

    FDR also threatened to carpet bomb Germany with chemical weapons if it used them against Soviet troops but refused to do so on behalf of the Jews because Jews didn’t have a state and therefore weren’t an ally plus they might really have to do it so it was inconvenient.

    He also threatened Japan. Found that one:

    http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-warns-japanese-against-using-poison-gas

    Found it:
    “Pressing at the Limits: The Challenge of the Hebrew Committee Of National Liberation to Chemical Warfare Policy”

    http://www.museumoftolerance.com/site/c.tmL6KfNVLtH/b.6585401/k.A1CD/Annual_2_Chapter_7.htm

  6. Excellent article but a couple of important examples were omitted that should not be: In 1940, FDR actively sabotaged the rescue of Jews from Vichy France who was deporting Jews to Nazi Germany.

    “The letter below was written to Hiram Bingham by the Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in response to rescue efforts of Jews and non-Jews in Vichy France.In addition to Hiram Bingham, who served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, and as such was in charge of issuing US visas, the letter mentions two other men. The first man is Dr. Frank Bohn, a representative of US labor organizations who helped to locate and rescue communists and socialists who were targeted by the Nazis for their political beliefs. The other man, Varian Fry, was a journalist sent by the Emergency Rescue Committee to Southern France, where the government of Vichy France agreed to turn all anti-Nazi activists in to the Nazis. Fry played a major role in rescuing thousands”

    “September 18, 1940

    AMERICAN EMBASSY,

    VICHY (France) FOR PARIS

    Your 539, September 11, 10 a.m. and 566, September 14, 6 p.m.

    You should inform Dr. Bohn and Mr. Fry in personal interview if this can be arranged immediately that while Department is sympathetic with the plight of unfortunate refugees, and has authorized consular officers to give immediate and sympathetic consideration to their applications for visas, this Government can not repeat not countenance the activities as reported of Dr. Bohn and Mr. Fry and other persons, however well-meaning their motives may be, in carrying on activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.

    You are requested in your discretion, to inform the appropriate officials of the Foreign Office that while aliens who qualify for and obtain visas at American consular offices as meeting the requirements of American immigration laws have the required visa documentation to proceed to the United States, this Government does not repeat not countenance any activity by American citizens desiring to evade the laws of the governments with which this country maintains friendly relations. You may also ask Mr. Hurley to inform the Prefect at Marseille in this sense. Consul at Marseille should also be informed that Dr. Bohn has been requested to return to United States immediately. You may also advise Embassy Paris and Consuls at Bordeaux and Nice regarding situation. Keep Department advised of developments.”

    https://www.facinghistory.org/rescuers/cordell-hulls-telegram-hiram-bingham-september-18-1940

    “Fry’s activities put him in conflict with the Vichy police, who put him under surveillance and eventually expelled him from France in September 1941. Fry returned home to New York to a less than warm reception from both the State Department, whose policies he had flouted, and surprisingly from the Emergency Rescue Committee itself, which disapproved of his extralegal methods. What recognition Fry has received has been for the most part posthumous, though the French government did honor him with the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur for his rescue activities, just prior to his untimely death in 1967.”

    – U.S. Holocaust Museum
    https://www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/search-the-collections/bibliography/varian-fry

    “According to Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority it is estimated that Fry and his team dealt with some 15,000 cases by May 1941. Of these, assistance was provided to approximately 4,000 people, over 1,000 of whom were smuggled from France in various ways.”

    http://www.varianfry.dk/

    also there is a new film about the letters that Anne Frank’s father wrote for years asking for asylum until they were finally killed. The Jewish immigration quotas were never filled.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4121274/

    Found an article that stupidly and offensively tries to make the connection this article correctly condemns — even if it left out a couple of important examples — though, believe it or not, two Orthodox Jews at a party in NY, a couple of years ago, one from Germany, one American, also drew this absurd connection when I advocated what President Trump is doing to stop Muslim immigration.

    FDR Surprised it leaves out the following:

    “The letter below was written to Hiram Bingham by the Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in response to rescue efforts of Jews and non-Jews in Vichy France.In addition to Hiram Bingham, who served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, and as such was in charge of issuing US visas, the letter mentions two other men. The first man is Dr. Frank Bohn, a representative of US labor organizations who helped to locate and rescue communists and socialists who were targeted by the Nazis for their political beliefs. The other man, Varian Fry, was a journalist sent by the Emergency Rescue Committee to Southern France, where the government of Vichy France agreed to turn all anti-Nazi activists in to the Nazis. Fry played a major role in rescuing thousands”

    “September 18, 1940

    AMERICAN EMBASSY,

    VICHY (France) FOR PARIS

    Your 539, September 11, 10 a.m. and 566, September 14, 6 p.m.

    You should inform Dr. Bohn and Mr. Fry in personal interview if this can be arranged immediately that while Department is sympathetic with the plight of unfortunate refugees, and has authorized consular officers to give immediate and sympathetic consideration to their applications for visas, this Government can not repeat not countenance the activities as reported of Dr. Bohn and Mr. Fry and other persons, however well-meaning their motives may be, in carrying on activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.

    You are requested in your discretion, to inform the appropriate officials of the Foreign Office that while aliens who qualify for and obtain visas at American consular offices as meeting the requirements of American immigration laws have the required visa documentation to proceed to the United States, this Government does not repeat not countenance any activity by American citizens desiring to evade the laws of the governments with which this country maintains friendly relations. You may also ask Mr. Hurley to inform the Prefect at Marseille in this sense. Consul at Marseille should also be informed that Dr. Bohn has been requested to return to United States immediately. You may also advise Embassy Paris and Consuls at Bordeaux and Nice regarding situation. Keep Department advised of developments.”

    https://www.facinghistory.org/rescuers/cordell-hulls-telegram-hiram-bingham-september-18-1940

    http://www.varianfry.dk/

    https://www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/search-the-collections/bibliography/varian-fry

    also there is a new film about the letters that Anne Frank’s father wrote for years asking for asylum until they were finally killed. The Jewish immigration quotas were never filled.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4121274/

    Found an article that stupidly and offensively tries to make the connection this article correctly condemns — even if it left out a couple of important examples — though, believe it or not, two Orthodox Jews at a party in NY, a couple of years ago, one from Germany, one American, also drew this absurd connection when I advocated what President Trump is doing to stop Muslim immigration.

    http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-mini-no-asylum-anne-frank-review-20160816-snap-story.html

    I wonder if President Trump is the first President in history who not only keeps most of his campaign promises — we’re still waiting on Jerusalem — but tries to do so in his first week in office!

  7. Good article but extremely odd that he went to the trouble of researching FDR and Vichy but didn’t include this. Sloppy scholarship? I posted this in a recent comment. Reposting. This time I will take the liberty of printing it out:

    “The letter below was written to Hiram Bingham by the Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in response to rescue efforts of Jews and non-Jews in Vichy France.In addition to Hiram Bingham, who served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, and as such was in charge of issuing US visas, the letter mentions two other men. The first man is Dr. Frank Bohn, a representative of US labor organizations who helped to locate and rescue communists and socialists who were targeted by the Nazis for their political beliefs. The other man, Varian Fry, was a journalist sent by the Emergency Rescue Committee to Southern France, where the government of Vichy France agreed to turn all anti-Nazi activists in to the Nazis. Fry played a major role in rescuing thousands.

    A telegram with annotations written on it.
    This telegram written to Hiram Bingham by the Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in response to rescue efforts of Jews and non-Jews in Vichy France during the Holocaust. Hiram Bingham served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, and as such was in charge of issuing US visas. The letter also mentions two other men: Dr. Frank Bohn and Varian Fry. Bohn was a representative of US labor organizations who helped to locate and rescue communists and socialists who were targeted by the Nazis for their political beliefs. Fry was a journalist sent by the Emergency Rescue Committee to Southern France, where the government of Vichy France agreed to turn all anti-Nazi activists in to the Nazis. Fry played a major role in rescuing thousands.

    September 18, 1940

    AMERICAN EMBASSY,

    VICHY (France) FOR PARIS

    Your 539, September 11, 10 a.m. and 566, September 14, 6 p.m.

    You should inform Dr. Bohn and Mr. Fry in personal interview if this can be arranged immediately that while Department is sympathetic with the plight of unfortunate refugees, and has authorized consular officers to give immediate and sympathetic consideration to their applications for visas, this Government can not repeat not countenance the activities as reported of Dr. Bohn and Mr. Fry and other persons, however well-meaning their motives may be, in carrying on activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.

    You are requested in your discretion, to inform the appropriate officials of the Foreign Office that while aliens who qualify for and obtain visas at American consular offices as meeting the requirements of American immigration laws have the required visa documentation to proceed to the United States, this Government does not repeat not countenance any activity by American citizens desiring to evade the laws of the governments with which this country maintains friendly relations. You may also ask Mr. Hurley to inform the Prefect at Marseille in this sense. Consul at Marseille should also be informed that Dr. Bohn has been requested to return to United States immediately. You may also advise Embassy Paris and Consuls at Bordeaux and Nice regarding situation. Keep Department advised of developments.”

    https://www.facinghistory.org/rescuers/cordell-hulls-telegram-hiram-bingham-september-18-1940

  8. anyone making a comparison between the Nobel prizewinners who daily seek and achieve advances for the world in meds, science, tech and arts…. with the head chopping honor killers who bring nothing but violence and intolerance…. is a total fraud… if they lie about that they will lie about everything else. Thats why I never beleive anything from them anymore.

    Muslims are a proven danger everywhere they go. Their beliefs are dangerous to all civilized societiees, their values involve serial deception. I dont care if a number of them are ok, the others harbor the ones they know are dangerous, just like trump said… he was right again when he observed that muslims dont tell you about their muslim neighbors planning murder. In any case its all irrelevant…its best to err on the side of caution for the security of americans… its not muslims first… its americans first….thats why i voted the dems out.
    Declaring CAIR and the MB is very important to purging the institutions of their dangerous moles.

  9. Ted Belman Said:

    I go further than Dunitz. I am against Muslim immigration to America because they are pro-sharia and anti-Semitic

    Amen!!! I have the right to live in safety and peace. Look what the Muslims have done to make American University Campuses unsafe for Jewish students.

  10. @ Ted Belman:
    Ted, the article and your comments are cogent. Tracing immigration policy, as recognized by our Founding Fathers, makes clear that the only litmus test for immigrants is one of good character. Is the immigrant seeking US citizenship in order to become a good citizen supportive of US civil society. President Washington’s letters to the Jewish Congregation in Newport and to the Baptist Society make that test clear. Both letters also make clear why those seeking sharia and jihad compliance should be barred from immigration today.

  11. I go further than Dunitz. I am against Muslim immigration to America because they are pro-sharia and anti-semetic.

    America has no obligation to permit Muslim immigration. She is entitled to pick and choose who she thinks will be good for America.

    She has every right to discriminate against anyone. CAIR’s lawsuit, just launched, for discrimination, will fail.