Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Hate Speech Has No Place in a Synagogue?

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

Rabbi Michael White and Rabbi Jerome Davidson write:

We write as rabbis devoted both to our faith community and to human rights for all peoples. We were disheartened to learn that the Great Neck Synagogue has invited Pamela Geller to speak on April 14. Geller has a long track record of hateful and virulently anti-Muslim views that seek to divide American Muslims and Jews, rather than unite them.
Both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have designated Geller’s “Stop Islamization of America” organization as a hate group. As was recently reported in the Jewish Week, Etzion Neuer, director of community service and policy for the ADL’s New York region, said that Geller “under the guise of fighting radical Islam, absolutely demonizes an entire religion. In directing her rhetoric at the entire Islamic faith, she fuels anti-Islamic bigotry. Geller doesn’t do us any favors,” he continued. “She muddies the waters because she hands the platform to the extremists in our midst. Instead of thoughtful, fact-based dialogue on the issues, we get incendiary rhetoric and xenophobia.”
We cherish our relationships and friendships within the local Muslim community. Both Temple Beth El of Great Neck and Temple Sinai of Roslyn share deep and abiding connections with the Islamic Center of Long Island. Our communities have broken bread together, studied together, engaged in social action projects together, and our children have learned from each other as well. The local Muslim community adds immeasurably to Long Island’s vitality, and we are blessed by their commitment to the betterment of our society. Their presence among us affirms the essence of America’s greatness, a nation founded on the principles of democratic pluralism.
We state unequivocally that Geller’s inflammatory rhetoric does not represent us or the great majority of Jews in Great Neck and on Long Island. Hate speech has no place in synagogues. Synagogues should be places for worship, positive dialogue and reasoned political debate. The right of free speech is vitally important, but Geller crosses the line from political to hate speech. In sharp contrast, Judaism teaches us to respect the traditions and values of other faiths.
Last fall the group T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights (formerly Rabbis For Human Rights-North America) echoed that sentiment with its effective New York City subway ad campaign that countered Geller’s offensive anti-Muslim subway posters. T’ruah’s message challenged: “In the choice between love and hate, choose love. Help stop bigotry against our Muslim neighbors.”
We share T’ruah’s vision, reflecting our faith’s mandate to work for understanding, unity and peace among all humanity. Geller’s messages seek to divide peoples, and fail to acknowledge that even with significant political differences, Jews and Muslims are working to build the world of justice and compassion that both faiths demand. Rather than trying to denigrate a diverse community and rich tradition, we must find ways of respecting one another and working together on shared concerns.

I wonder if these rabbis have ever read the Torah? When God commands the Israelites to commit genocide, is that hate speech?

Have these rabbis every read the siddur (Jewish prayer book)?

Is Pamela Geller’s rhetoric more hateful than the Book of Esther and the festival of Purim when we celebrate the slaughter of 70,000 of our enemies, or the Passover when we celebrate the slaughter of Egypt’s first born, or when we pray in the Amidah, “And for slanderers let there be no hope; and may all Your enemies be cut down speedily. May you speedily uproot, smash, cast, down, and humble the wanton sinners — speedily in our days. Blessed are you, HaShem, Who breaks enemies and humbles wanton sinners”, or when at the end of the morning prayers (Shacharit), we Jews say the Six Remembrances, including:

“You shall remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you went out of Egypt, how he happened upon you on the way and cut off all the stragglers at your rear, when you were faint and weary, and did not fear G‑d. [Therefore,] it will be, when the L‑rd your G-d grants you respite from all your enemies around [you] in the land which the L‑rd, your G‑d, gives to you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the heavens. You shall not forget!”?

Posted in Islam, Rabbis | Comments Off

The Jew In The Krome Processing Center

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

From Miami New Times:

On October 1, 2013, more than 60 men in jumpsuits crowded into the austere cafeteria at the Krome Service Processing Center, a huge Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility on the edge of the Everglades. The men, detainees from various Latin American countries, were gathered for a Spanish-language Catholic service.

…Noel Covarrubia, a short, middle-aged Venezuelan with a white mustache and thin-framed glasses, stood next to his yellow bunk bed under harsh fluorescent lights, his head bowed in prayer. A devout Jew, Covarrubia had spent every morning since he landed in Krome two years earlier reciting prayers softly by his bedside, usually standing with a few other Jews who lived in the same pod.

But this morning in 2013, a guard demanded that the men sit as she began a head count. Not wanting to break their prayers, the men ignored her. The guard began screaming, Covarrubia says: “‘You have to sit down! You have to sit down!'”

When Covarrubia refused, he says, he was promptly taken to solitary confinement, where he was kept alone in a small cement cell with a toilet. Covarrubia was held there for three days. The punishment — all for trying to practice his religion — was scarring, he says.

Covarrubia’s Krome nightmare started in 2010. The Venezuelan, who is now 50 years old, came to Miami as a young man. He worked in business and technology and eventually started his own company selling corporate websites. In 1989, he married an Ohio native named Donna, and the couple had two kids before separating eight years later.

But in his adopted country, Covarrubia also had brushes with the law. In 1994, he was charged with felony battery in Miami-Dade County and later sentenced to one year of probation; in 1997, in the middle of his lengthy divorce from Donna, he traveled to southern Ohio around Christmas, hoping to visit his two young children.

Instead Donna called police, and he was hit with a host of charges, including fourth-degree assault, criminal mischief, and trespassing. He pleaded guilty and was eventually deported, in February 1999.

In his birth country, Covarrubia tried to make a new life, he says, but found himself lost, especially after his father died. So he took another flight to the United States, then lived quietly (and illegally) for a decade or so, working with technology systems in Kissimmee and Savannah, Georgia; in 2006, leading up to the Venezuelan presidential elections, the tech-savvy Covarrubia even put together political videos for his distant relative Manuel Rosales — Hugo Chavez’s leading opposition candidate at the time.

Then came more legal trouble. In 2010, another woman accused Covarrubia of assault. The Osceola County case against him was dropped before charges could be filed, but Covarrubia had again caught ICE’s attention.

Believing he would be at risk in Venezuela because of his political involvement, he decided to fight the case. “I was extremely afraid to go back to my country,” he says.

That’s how he ended up inside Krome for four years. But in the facility, Covarrubia alleges, he was targeted because of his religion. He was routinely harassed by guards while trying to receive kosher meals, he claims, and often weathered ethnic insults. Once, in September 2012, a guard denied Covarrubia and several other Jews their scheduled Yom Kippur service, he says. The men had been planning the service for three months with a rabbi and had been fasting all day when a terse guard abruptly told them the ceremony was off.

“I don’t care if you like it or not,” Covarrubia remembers the guard saying. “You’re not going to celebrate Yom Kippur today.”

Covarrubia filed a federal discrimination suit against ICE and Doyon-Akal in 2013 while he was still in detention, but after “four years of hell,” he says, he gave up. Covarrubia was granted a voluntary repatriation. He knew he would be headed to an uncertain, likely dangerous situation in Venezuela — but at least he would be leaving Krome.

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Israel Struggles With Its 40,000 Plus Illegal African Immigrants

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

The richer Israel gets, the more attractive it becomes to Africans.

From the Forward.com: The visit with African asylum seekers in Tel Aviv introduced the pastors to one of Israel’s most disadvantaged, and controversial, groups. The approximately 40,000 such migrants in Israel, mostly from Eritrea, say they came to Israel to escape a brutal dictatorship and an unlimited, punishing military draft. But the government has portrayed them as illegal economic migrants who came to Israel for jobs.
Since 2013, the government has detained thousands in Holot, a detention facility adjacent to a prison on the Egyptian border. Last month, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that detainees must be released after a maximum stay of 12 months.
Speaking to the pastors about the migrants, International Fellowship of Christians and Jews President Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein said, “You have your human responsibility as people, as Jews,” adding that the government “need[s] to do better.” Sibhat Petros, an Eritrean Pentecostal preacher, then told the group about his escape from Eritrea to Israel because Pentecostal Christianity is illegal there.
But it doesn’t look like the meeting will mobilize the Church of God in Christ to aid the asylum seekers’ cause. Pastor Glenn Plummer, who led the group’s delegation, said he appreciated the meeting but that the group wants to focus more on aiding Ethiopian Israelis, not migrants.
“We don’t want to talk about the Eritreans, the immigration challenge,” he told JTA. “Our larger focus is to strengthen relations with the country of Israel.”
Eckstein also didn’t want to make a political statement, telling JTA that he sees the balance between helping vulnerable populations and securing Israel’s borders. But he said the visit was still vital for the trip, even if it shined a light on some of the government’s controversial policies.

Posted in Africa, Israel | Comments Off

Arab Americans look to Jews for help on Syrian refugees

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

The coalition of the fringe sticks it to the white core.

Ron Kampeas writes:

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society launches drive to let in 100,000 Syrians, while Reform leader writes to Obama
ANAHEIM, Calif. (JTA) — Arab Americans advocating on behalf of Syrian refugees have found some unlikely allies in their effort to resettle families from the war-torn nation: influential Jewish groups.
Over the last few days, HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, launched a petition drive calling on President Barack Obama to swiftly open America’s gates to an additional 100,000 Syrians, and the president of the Union for Reform Judaism wrote to the president and congressional leaders calling for a coordinated international response.
“Our great nation must respond immediately by providing safety, food, shelter, refuge, and dignity,” wrote the Reform leader, Rabbi Rick Jacobs. “How can a nation built by refugees from political persecution turn our back on refugees fleeing religious and political persecution?”
Omar Hossino, the Washington-based Syrian American Council’s public relations director, singled out HIAS as being particularly helpful.
“HIAS has been consistently calling for more resettlement and pushing back against the discriminatory rhetoric opposing opening the doors to Syrian refugees,” he said.
This week, HIAS president Mark Hetfield held a conference call with American Jewish organizational officials to talk about his agency’s decision to join with Arab-American leaders in critiquing US policies that limit the numbers of refugees settled in the United States to about 70,000 per year.
Only about 1,500 Syrian refugees have been admitted since the start of the civil war in 2011. Obama announced Thursday that the United States soon would take in 10,000 refugees, but Hetfield said that number was inadequate.
“We are dealing with a global humanitarian crisis to which the entire world must respond,” he said in a statement issued within hours of Obama’s announcement. “If Germany can open its doors to 800,000 asylum seekers, the US, with a population four times the size of Germany’s and a history as a nation of immigrants and refugees, can take 100,000.”
Hetfield appealed to regional Jewish groups to act on the grassroots level to help absorb refugees.
“The Jewish voice is very influential here, very important and very much needed,” Hetfield said.
Akram Abusharar, a Gaza-born US immigration attorney who handles approximately 80 Syrian asylum cases per month, said HIAS’s involvement was a boost to his cause.
“The Jewish community has more capacity to move the politicians on this issue than the Arab-American community,” he told JTA in an interview.

Nowhere does the article bother to argue that these refugees will be good for America. Nowhere does the article bother to argue that the Jewish state should take in Muslim refugees.

Posted in America, Arabs, Immigration, Jews | Comments Off

European Jews Fear Bringing Children to Synagogue on Rosh Hashanah

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

As a result of the massive importation of Africans and Muslims, Jews and non-Jews in Europe increasingly fear for their safety.

REPORT: With the Jewish New Year fast approaching, a new survey reveals that 85 percent of European Jews will not bring their children to Rosh Hashanah services due to growing concerns for their safety.

First reported by Israel’s Channel 2, “most European Jews are afraid to reveal their religion,” according to the poll conducted by the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE) in 179 Jewish communities across Europe.

U.S. Jewish publication the Algemeiner reports that “European Jewish organizations are concerned over these statistics, according to the report, because they further demonstrate the negative effects of the rise in antisemitism and nationalistic fervor across Europe, as well as the increasing level of Islamic immigration to the continent, on Europe’s Jewish communities and the participation of their members in communal activities.”

“Rabbis and many community leaders from across Europe are, unfortunately, reporting an increase in Jews who are refraining from all public identification with their Judaism,” Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the European Jewish Association, told Channel 2.

“Most young people whose parents avoid identifying as Jews do not retain a connection to the Jewish people and their homeland,” he explained.

Margolin added, “We are dealing now with a pincer movement. On the one hand, we see repeated waves of anti-Israel harassment, which is really anti-Semitic expression. On the other hand, especially in light of what has already been seen in many Islamicized cities throughout the continent, we are faced with a murky wave of nationalism and zenophobia.”

The RCE survey also revealed that 70 percent of Europe’s Jews completely avoid disclosing their religious identity.

These numbers represent a significant increase compared to this time last year.

A joint poll conducted by RCE and the European Jewish Associations (EJA) in September 2014 revealed that 40 percent of European Jewry hid their religious affiliation and 70 percent do not attend High Holiday services.

Sharp increases in anti-Semitism and Muslim migration to Europe have contributed to the rise of European Jewry moving to Israel, an event known as “making aliya.”

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Europe, Jews | Comments Off

Rabbi Mark Goldsmith: ‘In the spirit of the Kindertransport we want to extend a warm welcome to Syria’s refugees’

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

From the Guardian, July 8, 2015:

Last week I travelled on a minibus from north London with a group of elderly members of our synagogue to the Houses of Parliament to meet their local MP, Mike Freer, and discuss the refugee crisis in Syria.
Anyone looking at us would have seen a group of retired doctors, social workers, teachers and accountants, but the conversations inside that bus revealed an extraordinary gathering of people. As we journeyed they shared their own experiences and trauma of being child refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, most of them coming to this country alone. Despite the time that had passed, their recollections of realising, as children, that there was something terrible and wrong happening in their home countries, were still raw.
The group met Ayham, a recent refugee from Syria, who has come to this country through the Vulnerable Persons Relocation (VPR) scheme. This unlikely meeting of an elderly Jewish group with a young Muslim man, organised by Citizens UK, was a powerful moment. Many of our group saw themselves in this young man, and that meeting brought a sense of mission to us all.
It was clear that there was a sense of solidarity between the refugees, and Ayham was equally touched, saying: “My younger brother is very ill, he has leukaemia, and we were able to come to the UK to be with him and help him, we hope, recover. His terrible situation has meant we are now some of the lucky ones…
If the government in the 1930s had listened to the critics who said we didn’t have room, and we had enough problems caring for our own, then the entire group stood before the Houses of Parliament with me would not have survived. We should not forget that the Daily Express in its editorial on the issue on 19th June 1939 was less than charitable saying: “There is no room for any more refugees in this country.” But instead the Kindertransport and many other refugee programmes undertaken since are part of a proud British tradition of helping those in most need…
We’re pledging a warm welcome for newcomers offering everything from English language classes to invites for mother and baby groups. In our synagogue in north London we already run a refugee drop in session every Sunday where people come together to share food, offer advice on how to settle into the local neighbourhood and navigate British systems as well as link people up to groups like our knitting club. It’s our way of making people feel welcome.
You can encourage your local council to work with us here: Save Lives by Helping Resettle Refugees
Rabbi Mark Goldsmith is a member of Citizens UK and rabbi at Alyth synagogue, in Golders Green London.

Nowhere does the rabbi bother to argue that admitting low-IQ Syrian immigrants will benefit Europe. Nowhere does the rabbi argue that Israel should take this poison (Muslim immigrants who hate it).

At least this refugee crisis presents us with a clearer picture of those such as Rabbi Mark Goldsmith who are working from within to destroy us.

Posted in Immigration, Jews | Comments Off

IS DELPHINE HORVILLEUR THE FEMALE RABBI WHO WILL SAVE FRANCE?

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

From Tabletmag.com:

The ‘secular rabbi,’ who gained notoriety in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, skillfully negotiates the borders of ‘laïcité’ in a republic that remains on edge

…While her progressivism has made her a darling of secular society, she is not tender with the French model, in its current form at any rate. The stringent secularism that has spread in the past two decades has sown the very community divisions it allegedly seeks to head off, she says, creating a class of so-called “communitarian” offenders out of what were, previously, innocuously, individual Muslims or Jews. Muslims and Jews have, in turn, come to think of themselves increasingly as communities, with collective interests that may conflict with those of society at large.

…Only in the 1990s—as social tensions rose over Muslim girls wearing headscarves, and as religious practice in general was increasingly viewed as incompatible with a full life in society—did the notion of a “Jewish community” enter the public discourse. “This was a term that didn’t exist,” she said. Whether it was first used by French Jews or non-Jews she does not know, but in any case it is not an expression she endorses. “As if all that identified me were my Jewishness, as if this were the only component of my identity,” she said.

Still, despite herself, her Jewishness has lately come to the fore. After the January attack at a kosher market, she no longer brings her children grocery shopping; she has caught herself remarking to friends that men with peyos are “courageous” to ride the Métro in Paris. As much as she detests the “competition for victim-status” in which the French tend to engage, jockeying for recognition from the entitlement state—this is “the great French malady,” she said—she finds herself reassured by the soldiers who have been assigned since the killings to guard synagogues and other Jewish sites throughout the country. And yet she worries that protection will be viewed by some non-Jews as yet another symbol of Jewish privilege, reinforcing notions of a “Jewish community.” “It’s normal that the state protect us,” Horvilleur said, using the first-person-plural in what seemed an unconscious confirmation of her fears. “But at the same time, the more they protect us, the more they weaken us.”

Of course Jews, Muslims and other minorities have group interests that clash with other group interests. That’s as true for Jews and Muslims in France as it is for minority groups such as Gypsies and Chinese around the world.

Posted in France, Jews | Comments Off

TabletMag: SONIA NAZARIO’S CHUTZPAH GIVES A VOICE TO LATIN AMERICA’S VOICELESS MIGRANTS

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

Report:

Like many Jews, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author comes from a family that was persecuted and that migrated. She continues to help people fleeing violence and hopelessness.
Some might call Sonia Nazario a heroine. Others might call her a troublemaker. Some might not like her position on immigration. Others might not like her outspokenness about the inherent problems of immigrants leaving children behind. By any measure, however, Nazario may be one of the most important Jewish social activists that you have never heard of.
In 2015 alone she has received awards from the First Focus Campaign for Children and the Golden Door Award from HIAS Pennsylvania. She has also testified before Congress and the United Nations and is routinely speaking at college campuses around the nation. This week she was awarded an “honorary visiting professorship” at the Universidad Autónoma de Hidalgo in Mexico, from where she’ll also be reporting for the New York Times on migrant deaths in the country.
Nazario is a woman of coraje or chutzpah. She rode on top of rickety Mexican freight trains, better known as the trenes de la muerte or la bestia (trains of death; the beast), from Chiapas, Mexico, to the U.S. border to report on unaccompanied minors. With her on this journey were hundreds of immigrants, children, women, men, and gang members.
Many are fleeing unimaginable violence in Central America and Mexico in large part due to drug trafficking and gang warfare; by some measures Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the world, El Salvador the second, and Guatemala the fifth. Many are looking for better economic opportunities. And many, many more, especially the children, are following an implacable urge to find their mothers.
It took Nazario three months, seven freight trains, and one hitchhike with a driver of an eighteen-wheeler semi to travel from what she calls Mexico’s “heart of darkness,” Chiapas, to the U.S. border. Along the way she almost got knocked off the train by a tree branch, experienced extreme cold and heat, fear, and hunger. Why did she do this? Because she had heard from Carmen, who cleaned her house in Los Angeles, that her son, like many, was making the journey by himself to reach her. And that many more were doing the same thing. She set out to find out why. But nothing had prepared her for what she discovered: This year alone the United States projects that 40,000 unaccompanied minors will try to cross the border. That is down from last year’s high of 69,000, but Nazario says the number is likely higher, at least 85,000, because the numbers do not include the children who are just “tossed back over the border,” nor does it include those who were not caught…
Nazario’s U.S. citizenship—she is the only one of her siblings born in the United States—would prove useful during the military dictatorship. At 14, when she was safely back in the United States, she personally lobbied congressional leaders to save family friends…
The history of her own personal family is what served as the compass for her truth telling. “I think coming from two families that were persecuted and migrated had a big impact on me. There is always a sense of being an outsider, of being ostracized, and of being the other. I think Jews have always felt that way. Having a foot in both worlds means you never really fit in,” she said. “I think that has made me want to write about social issues.”
..Nazario told me that she is not “a radical pro-immigration open borders kind of gal.” She also knows that many of the governments in Central America are to blame for their current economic and political situation. But our tangled history with Latin America is also to blame. Today’s immigration is largely predicated on push factors that are deeply rooted in the United States’ long and infamous history of destabilizing the region through political and economic intervention for our benefit, our love affair with illegal drugs—we use more than any nation on earth, she said—and our failed immigration policies.
“As part of Plan Colombia we have spent about $8 billion to disrupt the drug trafficking up the Caribbean corridor,” she explained. “But narco-traffickers simply reroute. They even use submarines. Today four to five cocaine flights land every day in Honduras, and the cartels are fighting for turf to move the cocaine north. They recruit children to be their foot soldiers in this enterprise. They try to get young kids hooked on drugs. They especially target 10- and 11-year-old boys, telling them to start using crack or they will beat or kill them.”
Our failed immigration policies, past and present, are responsible as well. Since 1996, the United States tightened laws toward permanent residents who had committed certain crimes, which resulted in higher numbers of deportations back to Central America. “We have deported some 300,000 people, many with criminal histories. We deported gang members from the MS 13 gang and the 18th Street gang. So, we exported violent gangs to Central America, and that only increased the violence in those countries.”
In an attempt to protect these children, Microsoft and Angelina Jolie in 2008 founded the nonprofit Kids in Need of Defense: KIND, which recruits pro-bono attorneys to represent unaccompanied immigrant children. To date, over 9,000 lawyers have taken on a case.
…Nazario will continue her fight by using her position as a journalist and her involvement with KIND to advocate for society’s most vulnerable citizens.

Why would America want these low IQ immigrants from Central America? What advantage will they give America? The article does not bother with these questions.

Notice how the article calls these illegal immigrants “citizens”!

At least we can better get to know somebody who’s destroying our country. It makes us better at recognizing these people.

According to Wikipedia: “In 2006, Nazario published a book, Enrique’s Journey, which significantly expanded her newspaper series. It became a national bestseller and won two book awards. It has been published in eight languages and has been adopted by 54 universities and scores of high schools nationwide as their “freshman read” or “all-campus read.” In the fall of 2010, it was the second most-chosen book for freshman or all-campus reads at universities across the country.”

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Swamping Europe With Muslims

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

Clancy Sigal writes:

FAR FROM HOME, IN NEED OF HELP—BUT FROM WHERE?
As millions of Syrian refugees search for safety, their dire situation is reminiscent of those who fled Nazi Germany via British kindertransports
…Full marks then to Angela Merkel and the Germans who have a lot to live down and are doing it handsomely. And a salute to those individual Hungarian kids on the roadside who hand out water to exhausted Syrian trekkers. Boo to the official Hungarians whose Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, presiding over a country with a short memory and a rising tide of anti-Semitism, tells the refugees, especially if they’re Muslim, to eff off. Obviously he doesn’t remember how many countries took in Hungarian refugees after the 1956 revolution.
It’s not a moment for blame but for feeding, housing, and taking care. Yes, U.S. “foreign policy” got it wrong, wrong about Syria. Yes, Bush and Iraq. Yes, the hugely rich Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc. can’t care less.
But if I was a Syrian I too would hit the road rather than risk more lung-bursting barrel bombs from Assad’s air force or ISIS going door-to-door executing anybody they please.

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Understanding Hitler’s Hatred Of Jews

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Luke Ford

Historian Timothy Snyder (author of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning): So what Hitler does is he inverts; he reverses the whole way we think about ethics, and for that matter the whole way we think about science. What Hitler says is that abstract thought—whether it’s normative or whether it’s scientific—is inherently Jewish. There is in fact no way of thinking about the world, says Hitler, which allows us to see human beings as human beings. Any idea which allows us to see each other as human beings—whether it’s a social contract; whether it’s a legal contract; whether it’s working-class solidarity; whether it’s Christianity—all these ideas come from Jews. And so for people to be people, for people to return to their essence, for them to represent their race, as Hitler sees things, you have to strip away all those ideas. And the only way to strip away all those ideas is to eradicate the Jews. And if you eradicate the Jews, then the world snaps back into what Hitler sees as its primeval, correct state: Races struggles against each other, kill each other, starve each other to death, and try and take land.

Delman: And that’s a good world to Hitler?

Snyder: Yeah, that’s the only good. It’s a very dark, empty universe. I mean, that’s how Hitler describes it to himself. There are really no values in the world except for the stark reality that we are born in order to take things from other people. And so Hitler sees the only good thing as removing the Jews who pervert, as he says it, human nature and physical nature.

…I was struck that Hitler explicitly said that states are temporary, state borders will be washed away in the struggle for nature. In other words, the anarchy that he creates was actually there in the theory from the beginning. He says from the very beginning, what we have to do is destroy the Jews; strip away the artificial political creations that the Jews are responsible for; and let nature just take its course. And what he means by nature’s course is [that] the stronger races destroy the weaker races. …

If Hitler had just been a German nationalist who wanted to rule over Germans—if he was just an authoritarian who wanted to have a strong state—the Holocaust could not have happened. The Holocaust could happen because he was neither of those things. He wasn’t really a nationalist. He was a kind of racial anarchist who thought that the only good in the world was for races to compete, and so he thought that the Germans would probably win in a racial competition, but he wasn’t sure. And as far as he was concerned, if the Germans lost, that was also alright. And that’s just not a view that a nationalist can hold. I think a nationalist cannot sacrifice his entire people on the altar of the idea that there has to be racial competition, which is what Hitler did, and that’s what made him different from a Romanian nationalist, or a Hungarian nationalist, or what have you. At the end of the war, Hitler said, ‘Well the Germans lost, that just shows the Russians are stronger. So be it. That’s the verdict of nature.’ I don’t think a nationalist would say that.

And with the state, if anything that’s even more important. Hitler doesn’t so much make the German state stronger as prepare the German state to be an instrument for destroying other states, which is what the SS [Nazi paramilitary organization] does, and what the concentration camps are models for. And insofar as German power reaches outward, beginning in 1938, and destroys Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and then tries to destroy the Soviet Union, it creates a zone where the escalation of the Final Solution is possible. And again, that’s only possible—killing Jews is only possible—because states are destroyed. And the idea in the end, which is not true of course, … [is that] this racial struggle is going to eventually transform the German race until there’ll be some kind of final revolution at the end. That of course never happens…

Hitler uses popular frustrations to come to power. He uses the Great Depression to come to power. He presents himself precisely as a German nationalist who is going to get the German economy going, who is going to bring Germans inside the borders of Germany. That’s how he presents himself, but that is a lie. He’s quite consciously manipulating German national sentiment to get to power and then to start the war, which he thinks will transform the Germans, as it were, from a nation into a race. So he’s aware that German nationalism is a force in the world, but he’s just using it in order to create the world that he wants, which is this world of racial struggle. And he’s actually pretty explicit about that, which is pretty striking. So he knows that the Germans care about Germany, but he doesn’t. He actually just wants to manipulate their attachment to Germany—to toss them out into this struggle, which will purify them and so on…

You can create this fictional world in which you live, and which guides you and which allows you to move forward. In fact, it can even be a source of your success. So in December of ’41, when Hitler faces this unbeatable alliance basically of the British, the Americans, and the Soviets, he interprets that as the Jewish international conspiracy, which of course it wasn’t—the Jews had nothing to do with that whatsoever. But he interprets it that way, and he says, ‘Ah-hah! This is what I’ve always said, that all the world powers are controlled by the Jews, therefore they’re lining up against us,’ and then that becomes an argument for escalating the Final Solution. So the fictional world provides arguments that you then use to change the real world, because it’s at that point that the Final Solution becomes a total policy of killing all throughout Europe…

Sure, there was lots of anti-Semitism in, for example, Vienna, but the Jews of Vienna were murdered in Belarus. Why is that? And the answer is that the German state couldn’t actually murder them inside Germany—not in very large numbers. To carry out mass killing, it had to first create this zone of anarchy out in the east and then physically take the Jews and send them out there. …

Hitler’s goal is to spread anti-Semitism within the German population, and he succeeds in doing that, but he comes to power much more radical than the population, and he comes to power in part by concealing just how anti-Semitic he is.

In Poland, you have something like the opposite situation. … The government is less anti-Semitic than the population, and for the government anti-Semitism is a kind of problem…

It’s that his primary concern was unleashing some kind of correct world order which was just lurking beneath the surface. The right way to think about Hitler is that he thought there was a natural order, and you just had to do a few things to unleash it. You had to kill the Jews, you had to get the Germans into the war, and then you would return to the struggle, which was nature. And that was the only thing for Hitler which was good.

Posted in Adolf Hitler, Anti-Semitism, Germany, Nationalism | Comments Off