Rod Reuven Dovid Bryant and Jerry Gordon bring back for the 2019 Yom Ha Shoah commemoration program, Dr. Rafael S. Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. Medoff is the author of a new book, to be published this summer by the Jewish Publication Society, “The Jews Should Keep Quiet: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Rabbi Steven S. Wise, and the Holocaust”. It reveals the anti-Semitism of FDR and key cabinet officials, Cordell Hull at the State Department and Edward Stimson at the War Department. They blocked repeated calls by Jewish organizations for the bombing of the rail lines, bridges and crematoria at the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center in Poland.
Excuses that the current US Holocaust Memorial Museum spokesperson perpetrates by saying the Nazis would rapidly replace rail lines and bridges, despite evidence to the contrary. In the summer of 1944 over 300,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to their deaths at the infamous killing center. Dr. Medoff invalidates excuses made by these FDR officials such as Jewish prisoners might be killed and it would constitute a diversion of the air war effort. All while regular bombing runs by the 15th US Army Air Force were made at the Monwitz- Buna artificial rubber slave labor camp less than five miles away. Testimony by air crew personnel on those bombing runs suggested the feasibility of destroying the killing complex. Medoff noted the personal witness of Elie Wiesel, then a camp inmate, seeing US bombers flying overhead asking why they didn’t bomb Auschwitz. In his recent article, “Every Generation Needs to Bomb Auschwitz”, Medoff drew attention to the failure to learn the lessons of the Shoah genocide after WWII in Cambodia, Darfur, Rwanda, and Bosnia. He drew specific attention to American missile strikes on Syrian chemical weapons factories. Medoff cited a report of the Global Publc Policy Institute of 338 gas attacks by the Assad regime in Syria between 2012 and 2018. It was left to the Trump Administration to order missile attacks that finally stopped the use of chemical weapons against hapless civilians.
General American support for protecting European Jews during the Shoah was evident in a poll taken in 1944 that showed over 70 percent of Americans favored bringing Jews to America. That was a change from the late 1930’s period of anti-Semitism in the US that the FDR administration used to deny refuge to Jews even when there were unused refugee visa allotments for Germany and occupied lands.
Beyond the Matrix 01May2019 – PODCAST