Chaim Amalek: “Jesus Christ, if there is one argument that the friends of Israel (which I assume includes the Holocaust Museum) need to avoid making, it is this one. Otherwise, the goyim might well ask why Israel is not accepting any of these people, and why it is expelling so many of the Africans who got in before Israel built its Trump-like wall to keep them out. Smart Zionist Jews know all this, and are keeping their mouths shut.”
As the U.S. debates the security implications of accepting refugees from the Syrian crisis, Americans should remember our history — both good and bad — of dealing with Jewish refugees during World War II, a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum official said Tuesday.
There are some unfortunate similarities between the American reaction then and now, said Cameron Hudson, the director of the museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. The U.S., separated from the crisis by an ocean, can close its doors in a way that Europe cannot.
House Speaker Paul Ryan announced Tuesday that he would lead an effort to force a “pause” in admitting Syrian refugees, following the disclosure that one attacker in Paris may have used a fake Syrian passport to enter Europe. Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush have proposed litmus tests for Syrians based on religion, tests President Barack Obama said ran counter to American values.
“At the moment Americans are looking at retrenchment, these refugees are looking to the U.S. to be the shining city on the hill,” Hudson said. “That appeals to the better nature of Americans.”
The Holocaust Museum does not take positions on specific policies, such as President Obama’s plan to accept an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees next year. But when thinking about how to treat those fleeing atrocities in Syria, Hudson said, Americans should remember the failure of the international community to protect the victims of the Holocaust.
“You look at the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, we built high walls, we stopped legal immigration,” he said. “We’re not quite at that point yet, but there’s a growing backlash.”
The United States did accept thousands of Jews through regular immigration procedures during World War II but until 1944 didn’t have a specific program to address the flow of refugees fleeing the Nazis. Beginning in 1940, U.S. policy made it difficult for Jewish refugees to gain admittance to the U.S., and U.S. consulates were ordered to delay visa approvals on national security grounds.
For the Holocaust Museum, the refugee crisis is just one symptom of the U.S. failure to respond to the mass atrocities in Syria.
“The voices of moderation seem to be getting drowned out by people who are taking these very hard national security positions,” said Hudson. “Nobody can reasonably argue that the response from the international community has been enough. As an institution we have a mandate to be the voice that the Jews of the 1930s did not have.”
But the Jews of Europe in the early 20th century did have more advocates in the U.S. than today’s Syrians do. Those advocates constantly pushed the U.S. government to be compassionate and to take in more refugees. Syrians have little such support. But they do have precedent on their side. They continue to hope American morality will trump fear.
COMMENTS POSTED TO BLOOMBERG:
* Muslim refugees have more than 20 Muslim states that can take them in. At the time of the Holocaust, there was NO Jewish state at all.
* Not to be course, but it seems that the appropriate response to the “director of the museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide” statement of moral imperatives is: “So?”
It seems that Mr. Hudson is intent on trading on the perceived moral authority of his institution. Though, to be fair, what moral authority it has I am unsure. The last time I checked we had not solicited the opinion of the director of the American Museum of Natural History.
This is not a new comparison, and it seems doubly slanderous: first, in the comparison of the Jews of Europe with these “Syrian Refugees” (if there was ever an allegation that there were Nazi infiltrators hidden among those Jews, I crave to see that citation). Second, because of the generality of this article: ISIS does offer a specific threat of genocide to groups, but those groups are not the mass of people pouring into Europe. Christians, Yazhidis and other distinct minorities fill that role, and to not single out their specific plight is outrageous.
* A significant number of these “refugees” are military-age men who are mobbed up with ISIS. We have no way to vet them. Cameron Hudson is perhaps enjoying some moral preening, but these refugees are dangerous. Show some compassion for your fellow Americans.
* I gather from this that the United States has a moral obligation to give sanctuary to religious or ethnic minorities facing genocide. Is that right?
On Monday, I reported that Daily Beast reporter Josh Rogin had been accused of secretly recording Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks at last week’s Trilateral Commission event in Washington. Rogin’s reporting on those remarks, however he obtained them, led to great frustration at the State Dept. — Kerry drew fire from Jewish organizations for saying that Israel could become “an apartheid state” — and prompted a personal letter of apology from Trilateral Commission chairman Joseph S. Nye.
Well, it’s not the first time Rogin has been suspected of privately recording remarks. In 2009, as a reporter for Foreign Policy, he attended the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington on Yom Kippur and reported on a conversation between Israeli ambassador Michael Oren and journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, both of whom were members of the congregation. That conversation was on the record, thoug Rogin’s report, as Goldberg remembers it, was “a wildly inaccurate account on many fronts.”
