Netanyahu says, You also refused to bomb Auschwitz

Mondoweiss

Hopefully, a lot will be written about Benjamin Netanyahu's angry and defiant speech to AIPAC last night, and about how the Israel P.M., who was flanked by two heavyset guards with clipped hair and shiny suits, sought to rally the Israel lobby against President Obama.

"Amazingly, some people refuse to acknowledge that Iran's goal is to develop nuclear weapons. You see, Iran claims that it's enriching uranium to develop medical research. Yeah-- right," Netanyahu said and went on to envision an ICBM headed your way and suggested you tell yourself it is filled with medical supplies.

The speech was notable for Netanyahu likening the Iranians to Nazis, and Iran's nuclear program to Auschwitz.

"I will never allow my people to live in the shadow of annihilation," he said. And: "Some commentators would have you believe that stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous [than allowing Iran to get one.]"

Then Netanyahu got out copies of two letters he said he keeps in his desk, between the World Jewish Congress and the War Department in 1944, when the WJC called on the United States to bomb the extermination camp at Auschwitz, and the War Department refused. The letters are below. The refusal included the argument that attacking the camp might unleash even more "vindictive" behavior.
"Think about that," Netanyahu said. "Even more vindictive than the Holocaust!"

The John McCloy letter he read from is widely cited among American Jews as a coded statement of anti-Semitism at the highest level of American society at that time. I grew up hearing about McCloy. The suggestion was clear: America didn't act the last time either. The New York Times is reporting that Obama told Netanyahu that Israel's war talk had already caused gas prices to go up.

Netanyahu added that 1944 is not 2012, but the difference is that there is now a Jewish state that will take action to save Jews and preserve the Jewish future. "Never again will the Jewish people be supplicants for our very survival," he said.

We must ask ourselves, What are Netanyahu's real aims? Is he trivializing the Holocaust for political ends: in order to knock Obama out of the White House or  gain an advantage over a regional competitor? Already Israel has gotten crippling sanctions against Iran, and Obama is promising to do more, and the Republican presidential candidates even more than that. A highly effective politician, Netanyahu has us right where he wants us.

Here are the letters, from PBS:

WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS

August 9, 1944

Hon. John J. McCloy
Under Secretary of War
War Department
Washington, D.C.

My dear Mr. Secretary:

I beg to submit to your consideration the following excerpt from a message which we received under date of July 29 from Mr. Ernest Frischer of the Czechoslovak State Council through the War Refugee Board:

"I believe that destruction of gas chambers and crematoria in Oswiecim by bombing would have a certain effect now. Germans are now exhuming and burning corpses in an effort to conceal their crimes. This could be prevented by destruction of crematoria and then Germans might possibly stop further mass exterminations especially since so little time is left to them. Bombing of railway communications in this same area would also be of importance and of military interest."

Sincerely yours,

A. Leon Kubowitzki
Head, Rescue Department



14 August 1944

Dear Mr. Kubowitski:

I refer to your letter of August 9 in which you request consideration of a proposal made by Mr. Ernest Frischer that certain installations and railroad centers be bombed.

The War Department had been approached by the War Refugee Board, which raised the question of the practicability of this suggestion. After a study it became apparent that such an operation could be executed only by the diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources. There has been considerable opinion to the effect that such an effort, even if practicable, might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.

The War Department fully appreciates the humanitarian motives which promoted the suggested operation, but for the reasons stated above it has not been felt that it can or should be undertaken, at least at this time.

Sincerely,

John J. McCloy
Assistant Secretary of War

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9/11 Truth Isn’t Going Away

Alissa C. Johnson
Intercept

      As 9/11’s tenth anniversary approaches, the issues surrounding that seminal event are just as relevant today and a lot more urgent.  Despite the change of management, we still bomb, still rendition, still torture, still illegally wiretap, still detain indefinitely without habeas corpus and without counsel, among other international crimes.  These days we can add a few more items to that list like irradiate children, feel up grandma at the airport, and throw people in jail for not paying their credit card bills.  Another thing we still do in America: obstruct the truth when it conflicts with the official 9/11 storyline.

     “Hysteria” has been defined as a compulsion in which the actor repeats the same action over and over in the face of a negative outcome.  Our politicians and civic leaders, through the mainstream media machine are hysterical on the subject of 9/11, parroting the same tired lies as if by cramming that sandwich in our faces enough of us will eventually swallow it.  While we may see the pre-packaged fantasy internalized by dullards, most of us aren’t buying the government’s heroic tragedy, a fictional catalyst that has propelled the United States into war in Afghanistan, Iraq, now Libya and who knows where next. Syria? Pakistan? Yemen? Iran?

     There has been much analysis of the psychological roadblocks thrown up by those who cannot or will not accept the reality of a 9/11 false flag attack on domestic soil.  As described by activist Ken Jenkins, such denial may be attributed to the scale and sheer audacity of the act, the paradigm-shifting implications of 9/11, blind nationalist faith, shame on the part of those fooled, PTSD, and simple ignorance of historical precedents.[1]   Factor in an embarrassing level of credulity and these elements have contributed to the thumb-sucking compliance of a population dumbed down and infantilized to the point where it believes our government has its best interests at heart.

     Of course history does not support the gumdrop and gingerbread view of government to which so many folks subscribe.  But the myth of America is powerful.  We are the good guys, revolutionaries who threw off the yoke of British imperialism two hundred thirty-five years ago and created the Constitution, a document so powerfully associated with rebellion that the FBI identifies those who reference or defend it as domestic terrorists.[2]

     These days even the dullest coach potato is starting to realize that the interests our government seems to hold closest to the chasm in its tin chest are not those of the people, at least not We the People.  There is suspicion arising that it serves the interests of those other “people” known as “corporations.”

     This does not bode well for our masters (whoever they are) who had no doubt hoped to keep a lid on truth of all kinds long enough to establish more complete control over this part of the Western world.  We can see the soft fascism of the U.S. rapidly hardening into something scarier.  If you disagree with that assessment, you’ve probably never been Tasered for questioning a public official about his membership in a powerful secret society.[3]

    

     Despite the rumblings of discontent, there are still many people with their heads firmly in the sandbox when it comes to 9/11.  It seems incredible that anybody with a rudimentary grasp of physics – those physical laws that can be intuited by a five-year-old playing with blocks – would believe that the World Trade Center buildings crumbled at near freefall speed into their own footprints without blowing out supporting structures in a carefully planned fashion.  While such opinions exist in people with a scientific vacuum between their ears, it does not give us the complete picture.  Clearly there are powerful psychological forces at play when the best they can throw at the 9/11 Truth movement is name-calling and obfuscation.

     Incredulity in the face of horrific government acts is nothing new.  The concept of psychic numbing was developed in connection to the victims of the U.S.’s atomic atrocity in Japan. We not only became Death, as Oppenheimer commented after detonation of the first atomic bomb, we became Hell.  Survivors of Hiroshima have said that in response to the overwhelming horrors of the atomic bomb they “simply ceased to feel”, often within minutes or seconds.[4]   From a psychological standpoint, psychic numbing protects the self from shattering.  It is a survival mode, but intense psychic numbing can devolve into passivity and confusion.  One form of numbing derives from the human mind’s inability to take in what it cannot connect to prior experience or imagination. As one journalist who witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald put it:  “You can’t understand it, even when you’ve seen it.”[5]

     The most recent laboratory for psychic numbing of Western peoples took place during World War II as a result of the systematic annihilation of Jews and others in Hitler’s Nazi death camps.  Even the most politically astute Jews of that time had difficulty accepting the reality of the Holocaust. Maria Syrkin, former editor of the Labor Zionist journal Jewish Frontier, described “how difficult it was as late as 1942 for even the most alert and nationally sensitive sector of American Jewry to make the psychic leap from an awareness of bloody persecution to acknowledgment of the reality of the Final Solution.”[6]

     For the Jews of that era, as for most people everywhere, the idea that a project so extreme and so murderous could be mounted in the middle of the twentieth century was simply unimaginable.[7] In late 1944, John McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, turned to A. Leon Kubowitzki, a senior official of the World Jewish Congress, and said, “We are alone.  Tell me the truth.  Do you really believe that all those horrible things happened?”  Kubowitzki later wrote: “His sources of information were better than mine.  But he could not grasp the terrible destruction.”[8]  Even after the American press made public the news of the final solution, most Americans could not accept what was happening in Europe.  A poll of Americans in January 1943, when approximately a million Jews had already been killed, indicated that less than half the U.S. population believed that mass murder was occurring.  Most thought it was just a rumor.[9]

     Examining how the American public reacted to and absorbed the Nazi atrocities is particularly instructive because it took place at a time when media and information were ubiquitous. In the Internet age, news is distributed to us at a breakneck pace, no longer a fountain but an avalanche of data composed of information and disinformation, mainstream mouthpieces, independent journalist-bloggers and everything in between.  Today information documenting the discrepancies of the official 9/11 story is available on the Internet for anyone to analyze and consider. Yet many citizens still remain in the dark about 9/11.

     9/11 turned out to be a revealing social experiment that precipitated out one group of people and left the other dissolved.  Those who precipitated out are citizens not afraid to face the truth of government corruption.  We are the people who will not drink the Kool-aid despite personal and professional costs that run the gamut from arguing over the dinner table to losing a job.  We remember from grade school physics class that it is impossible for a building to fall at free-fall speed unless supporting structures have been removed.  We question the official story.

Holocaust Survivor Accused of Being an Anti-Semite for His Talk about Israel

Sacramento Bee

Dr. Hajo Meyer

Sacramento's carefully cultivated interfaith bonds are being stretched to the limit by an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who is scheduled to speak at a local mosque about the Nazi Holocaust and Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer makes the 11th stop on his national "Never Again for Anyone" tour at the Sacramento League of Associated Muslims Islamic Center at 7 p.m. tonight.

Meyer has equated the Holocaust to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, drawing intense fire from Sacramento's Jewish community and the Anti-Defamation League.
 
"Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is repugnant, anti-Semitic and defiles the sacred memory of millions who perished during the Holocaust," said Rabbi Reuven H. Taff, president of the 13-member Board of Rabbis of Greater Sacramento, in a civil but emotional exchange of letters with SALAM's Imam Mohamed Abdul Azeez.

The Board of Rabbis praised Azeez for his bridge-building with other communities of faith, but asked him to either boycott the event or stop it from happening at SALAM. If he doesn't, Taff said in a letter to him, "then all the good work you are doing to foster relations with the interfaith community will be severely undermined."

"The event is not going to be canceled," said Azeez, who encouraged "any of our friends in the Jewish community to attend, ask questions and engage the speakers."

Azeez noted that eight national organizations and nine local organizations are sponsoring it, including the Florin Japanese American Citizens League and the local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Azeez said that a member of American Muslims for Palestine reserved the hall and the event is not sponsored by SALAM. He said SALAM's board investigated the speakers, who in addition to Meyer include UC Berkeley political scientist Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian American.

"You have a Holocaust survivor talking for the first time to the Muslim community about the Holocaust and putting it in a modern context that the rights of all people should be respected," Azeez said. "The world is changing, and it's time for us to have more dialogue about these untouchable idols," such as the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Azeez agrees that the rabbis raise a legitimate concern – "any attempt to equate the Holocaust with what is happening in Palestine is an atrocity."

Azeez said SALAM's management will not allow the speakers to compare Israel to the Nazis.
But Taff said Meyer's views are intolerable to the Jewish community, and added that the rabbis could produce Holocaust survivors to talk to Muslim Americans without inciting Muslim-Jewish hostility.
Rabbi Nancy Wechsler-Azen of Congregation Beth Shalom said Meyer's speeches and writings are "most offensive – the program promotes hate. It's an attempt to de-legitimize Israel and Judaism, as opposed to having a meaningful discussion over a political policy."

Wechsler-Azen said the event isn't the way to heal people "who have such profound wounds between them … we have forged a very meaningful relation with SALAM, and we're heartsick about this."
Meyer, in an exclusive interview with The Bee, said he survived 12 years under Hitler and 10 months in Auschwitz.

"I have a number on my arm and they dare to call me an anti-Semite?" he said.

Because he was not allowed to attend high school in Nazi Germany, Meyer said, "I can identify with those Palestinians who undergo slow-motion genocide when they are not allowed to go to their schools," which have been bombed.

"Nearly all Jewish religious organizations in the world have mixed up Judaism – which is universal, humanistic and friendly to anybody – with Zionism," said Meyer, who defined Zionism as an ideology based on a well-defined Arab enemy that must be destroyed.

Jon Fish, president of Sacramento's Interfaith Service Bureau representing major faiths in the region, said Palestine is a social issue, not a religious one.

"The rabbi and the imam have to work it out," Fish said, "But this might be a no-win situation."
Taff said he welcomes a discussion between Jews and Muslims "in an atmosphere of collegiality and respect." But if SALAM hosts an event that Taff believes is "clearly anti-Semitic," he said, "it makes it very difficult to sit down at the same table with anyone who supports or endorses a program of hate."