Over the next three years America could easily absorb 100,000 French Jews – the number cited by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls when he declared, “If 100,000 Jews leave, France would no longer be France.”
Leading Republican members of Congress need to step forward and begin the process to provide these visas, as the Obama administration not only downplayed the murderous anti-Semitism of a minority of French Muslims but is also insisting that French Jews do not want to emigrate.
In late January, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, the highest ranking Jew in Obama’s cabinet, spent a few hours in Paris talking to several French-Jewish leaders and then declared that “What I heard was a real desire to stay in France and have France be a place where they felt safe.”
Ironically, a week before Lew’s flying propaganda visit, Avi Weiss, Lew’s longtime rabbi at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and a leader of the Free Soviet Jewry movement, wrote an op-ed that appeared in The Jewish Press about a solidarity mission he’d conducted in support of French Jews. Rabbi Weiss found that “virtually every French Jew I spoke with expressed fear about being – remaining – in France” and he urged Jewish Americans to lobby “Congress to smooth the process for those” wanting to move to the United States.
Just when I thought the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Obama administration had reached its lowest point, the president gave an interview on February 9 to Matthew Yglesias of vox.com in which he referred to the Islamist murderers in France as “violent, vicious, zealots” who “randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”
This vague characterization of an anti-Semitic mass murder ignited a firestorm of criticism from conservative news commentators, while their liberal counterparts and Democratic members of Congress remained unconscionably silent. They must be hiding in the same Federal Witness Program as Ira Forman, the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat Anti-Semitism. On the pages of the State Department’s website devoted to “Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism” there isn’t a single word about the heinous murder of the six French Jews last month from Secretary Kerry, Forman, or other top department officials in the “Press Releases and Remarks” highlighted tabs.
The day after Obama’s remarks, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest and State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki refused to characterize the slaughter of the four French Jews at the kosher supermarket in Paris as anti-Semitic. The ensuing media uproar led the two Obama administration spokespersons to disavow their ignorant remarks several hours later.
If Democrats Henry Jackson and Charles Vanik were alive today, they would certainly denounce their party’s cowardice in not confronting the virulent anti-Semitism that has become deeply embedded in France. And they would vigorously advocate for the immigration of French Jews to America.
Actually, given the murderous attacks on a Jewish museum in Brussels in May 2014 and the main synagogue in Copenhagen earlier this month, expedited immigration legislation for 500,000 French Jews should be extended to the 700,000 Jewish citizens of other Western European and Eastern European countries.