{Originally posted to the author’s blogsite, The Lid}
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.
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.