NONSENSE: Refugees from Terror-Prone Countries Not Comparable to Holocaust Refugees

Jeff Dunetz:

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.

In June 2016 then CIA Director Brennan said during congressional hearings that one of the ways terrorists infiltrate western nations is by embedding themselves within groups of refugees.

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.

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