Thursday, August 02, 2012

Fwd: Another Obama Failure - Failure to fight Genocide by Dr. Rafael Medoff director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies

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Dr. Medoff usually focuses on the Holocaust and subtly expects his readers to apply it to current events . But in this article he can not restrain from  blatant condemnation of the Obama Administration and compares  it with the Holocaust Era. After all, we are talking about Genocide. One can not afford to be lackadaisical. Each day brings  bloodshed.  His message touched a personal nerve.    In April 7, 1944 two Jews escaped Auschwitz-Birkenau and warned the Judenrat of the massive preparations underway at Birkenau for the eradication of the last remaining Jewish community, 800,000 of Hungary....The birthplace of my grandparents ... In May and June 1944, 427,000 were sent to Auschwitz, my parents included. Most were gassed.  Had the world acted in April, 1944, that month could have made a difference in saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews.... So in addition to blaming Obama, let us look inward and recognize the evil plans of the PA.  How can we be silent and allow a Palestinian State to achieve credibility and respectability and legitimacy.   Let us expose them from their own sources.  (See Palestinian Media Watch if you are not convinced). Our Jewish Leaders must not repeat the mistakes of the Judenrat.  Today was the Siyum Hashas. The 6,000,000 Kedoshim were remembered.  The Nazi atrocities were addressed and Kadish was said and Ani Maamin sung.  Yet as I was listening live online, I don't remember hearing any mention of the Muslim Nazi collaborators of our times, the followers, the Muslim Brotherhood, the spiritual heirs  of the Mufti of Jerusalem, partner to Hitler Yemach Shemo,  and the real dangers that are threatening Israel and the Western World TODAY.  The Muslim Brotherhood is rapidly gaining strength in Europe, Hashem Yishmor, Sharia is infiltrating  all branches of United States gov't and the warning bells are ringing from our own elected officials.  Are we burying all this distressing news and closing our eyes and ears hoping it all will go away? CAIR for example was transported from the Palestinian Authority.

Escaping Auschwitz by Ruth Linn published by Cornell University Press.   This is what is written on the jacket cover.

On 7 April 1944 a Slovakian Jew, Rudolf Vrba (born Walter Rosenberg), and a fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler succeeded in escaping Auschwitz - Birkenau. As block registrars, both the men had been allowed relative (though always risky) freedom of movement in the camp and thus was able to observe the massive preparations underway at Birkenau of the entire killing machine for the eradication of Europe's last remaining Jewish community, the 800,000 Jews of Hungary.  The 2 men somehow made their way back to Slovakia where they sought out the Jewish Council (Judenrat) to warn them of the intending disaster.

The Vrba-Wetzler report was the first document about the Auschwitz death camp to reach the free world and to be accepted as credible. Its authenticity broke the barrier of skepticism and apathy that existed up to that point.  However, though their critical and alarming assessment was in the hands of Hungarian Jewish Leaders by April 28 or early May 1944, it is doubtful if the information it contained reached more than just a small number of of the prospective victims -during May and June 1944 about 427,000 Hungarian Jews boarded in good faith, the "resettlement" trains that were to carry them off to Auschwitz, where most of them were gassed on arrival.

Vrba, who emigrated to Canada at war's end , published his autobiography in England nearly 40 years ago.  Yet his and Wetzler's story has been carefully kept from Israel's Hebrew reading public and appears nowhere in any of the history texts that are part of the official curriculum. As Ruth Linn writes "Israeli history historiography was to follow the spirit of the courts policy at the Eichmann trial: silencing and removing challenging survivors from the gallery, and muting questions about the role of the Jewish Council in the deportations".

In 1998 Linn arranged for publication of the 1st Hebrew edition of Vrba memoirs.  In Escaping Auschwitz she establishes the chronology of Vrbas disappearance not only from Auschwitz, but also from the Israeli Holocaust narrative, skillfully exposing how the official Israeli historiography of the Holocaust has sought to suppress the story.


Tisha Baav Yizkerem - Rabbi Weissmandl and Rabbi Shonfeld of Kinder Transport were Askanim!

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: AFSI <afsi@rcn.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 5:10 PM
Subject: Another Obama Failure- This time involving Genocide
To: faigerayzel@gmail.com


Americans for a Safe Israel
 
Americans For a Safe Israel
1751 Second Avenue (91st Street)
New York, NY 10128
Contact: Helen Freedman, Executive Director
August 1, 2012

 

 

 

 

FIGHTING GENOCIDE--VERY, VERY SLOWLY 


by Rafael Medoff


(Dr. Rafael Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and coauthor, with Prof. Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of the new book 'Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the "Jewish Vote" and Bipartisan Support for Israel.')

  

A new poll has found 69% of Americans believe the United States "should prevent or stop genocide or mass atrocities from occurring in another part of the world."

 

Yet the agency that the Obama administration created more than three months ago to fight against mass atrocities in other parts of the world still does not have an office, phone number, or email address. Somehow, the candidate who vowed, "I won't turn a blind eye to slaughter" became the president who is blind, deaf, and mute to mass murder abroad.


In April, President Obama inaugurated the Atrocities Prevention Board, and named his adviser Samantha Power as director. It was the first time the United States officially took upon itself the responsibility for protecting civilians in other countries--and as the new Penn Schoen Berland poll demonstrates, it is a policy more than two-thirds of Americans support.

 

But that was April. Now it's August. And the Board still has no web site, no phone number, and no email address. Unless they are well hidden, it does not have an office or a staff, either. Despite all the fanfare and high-sounding pronouncements --and despite all the fresh atrocities in Sudan and elsewhere crying out for its attention-- the Atrocities Prevention Board still does not exist.


Recently I asked some colleagues in Washington what they made of this. "Sounds like government," they said. If it were any other issue, I too might chalk it up to bureaucratic inertia, sigh in frustration, and turn my attention elsewhere.


But we're talking about genocide. Genocide is different. And the response should be different.


During the Holocaust, one of the most frequent complaints by rescue advocates was the achingly slow pace of the Allies' response.

 

Congressman Emanuel Celler (D-New York) charged that the Roosevelt administration's procedure for reviewing refugees' visa applications was "glacier-like in its slowness." Newspaper ads sponsored by the activist Bergson Group, pleading for U.S. rescue action, bore headlines such as "Time Races Death; What Are We Waiting For?" A Treasury Department report accused the State Department of "gross procrastination" in dealing with rescue matters. An editorial cartoon in the Palestine Hebrew newspaper HaBoker depicted a race to Auschwitz between a German with a death's-head flag driving a tank and an Allied"rescuer" riding a tortoise.


Mass murder required an approach that was not limited by ordinary considerations, they maintained. "Do we need to tell you [Allied leaders] what to do at a time of national danger?," U.S. Labor Zionist official Baruch Zuckerman asked in an emotional address to the 1943 American Jewish Conference. "At such a time do you maintain your established peacetime methods? Do you not change your entire life?"

 

When Jews were being murdered every day, there was a direct correlations between the pace of the response and the death toll. In August 1943, Secretary of State Cordell Hull himself said he would approve a request by Congressman Andrew Somers (D-New York) and several other rescue advocates to travel to Turkey, in order to pressure the government there to let Jewish refugees pass through its territory. Two months later, a furious Somers was telling reporters that he still had not received the necessary authorization. "Who knows how many people we could have rescued by now if our delegation had been permitted to proceed as soon as Secretary Hull gave his approval."


One of the most notorious instances involved several hundred rabbis who were placed temporarily in the Vittel transit camp in northeastern France, instead of being sent to Auschwitz, because they held Latin American passports and thus might be useful in an exchange for German POWs held by the Allies. When the Germans began doubting the documents' authenticity and prepared to deport the rabbis, rescue activists pleaded with the Roosevelt administration to confirm that they would include the holders of the documents in a prisoner exchange. But State Department officials, uneasy about seeming to endorse false passports, stalled in responding. By the time they reluctantly assented, two months later, it was too late: the rabbis had been shipped off to the gas chambers. 


How many Sudanese blacks in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, or the Blue Nile region have been murdered during the long months that White House aides have been trying to figure out how to secure a domain name for the Atrocities Prevention Board?


The outgoing prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, said at his farewell dinner, in June, that "There's ongoing genocide [in Darfur]...the new weapons of the genocide--starvation and rape--are working very well." And New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported from Sudan earlier this summer that the regime of Omar al-Bashir is carrying out "mass atrocities that echo Darfur" against non-Arab tribes in the Nuba Mountains.

 

This is not to say that the Atrocities Atrocities Prevention Board could have prevented every single one of those atrocities from occurring. But at least there would have been a glimmer of hope that some lives would have been saved. So long as the Obama administration continues to only pay lip service to the fight against genocide, there is not even that. 

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ACTION: CONTACT THE WHITE HOUSE: 202-456-1111;1414 and ask about THE ATROCITIES PREVENTION BOARD - When will it be activated??????????

     
     

 

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