By Alan
Caruba
There was some serious irony when U.S.
Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew gathered together with French President Francois
Hollande and a Russian delegation led by Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s chief of staff,
along with leaders from Germany and Austria to participate in the January 27
ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by Russian troops.
I suspect that an entire generation or
two born after that year, 70 years ago, may have little or no knowledge of what
Auschwitz was. It was a Nazi death camp located in Oswiecim, Poland. Its full
name was Auschwitz-Birkenau and it is estimated that one million people, mostly
Jews, were killed there.
I say “irony” because
Auschwitz-Birkenau was part of a system of six Nazi death camps that included
Belzac, Chelmo, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. Each camp was filled with the
victims of a widespread anti-Semitism that had existed in Europe for two
thousand years, so it was not difficult for the Germans to turn a blind eye or
the French and others to provide assistance in rounding up their
Jews.
In addition to the Jews, an estimated
five million others deemed enemies of the state for political or other reasons
such as being Communists, trade unionists, gypsies or homosexuals also died in
the camps.
What is rarely acknowledged is that
the Europeans of that era were largely educated, had a rich culture of music,
literature, and drama, and many were church-goers. In short, you would not have
been able to tell them apart from the Europeans of today.
The Nazis wrote the book on the use of
terrorism to facilitate their barbaric, murderous theology of death. The Muslims
that have moved to Europe have adapted it to their own ends, seeking like the
Nazis to become globally dominant. They don’t have death camps—yet—but the
widespread and constant slaughter in which they are engaged has a similar feel
to it.
In the 1930s those European Jews had
few places to which to flee. They were not even that welcome in America where
anti-Semitism was widespread. Those that could did emigrate and, again there is
irony because several of the German physicists that came to the U.S. were
instrumental in the creation of the atomic bomb that ended World War II while
others played roles in the Nazi’s defeat during the war. One such emigrant,
Albert Einstein, was the first to suggest the creation of the weapon to Franklin
Roosevelt.
In response to European anti-Semitism,
a movement called Zionism had begun before World War II with the intention of
reestablishing Israel as a Jewish state where Jews could be safe. The movement
was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1896. Here again there is irony because the
movement was dominated by secular Jews who were not motivated by Jewish history
or the Torah. What they wanted was to be free of the oppressive antipathy of the
nations in which they lived. What they were seeking was
emancipation.
By the time World War II occurred they
were a force to be recognized in Israel, known at the time as the Palestinian
Mandate and run by the British who, as often as not, shared the anti-Semitism
that had given life to the Zionist movement. It would take the Holocaust to
accelerate the movement of Europe’s surviving Jews to Israel which in 1948
declared its sovereignty and was immediately attacked by the Muslim nations
surrounding it.
Fast forward to our times and the Jews
of Israel as well as those around the world know one truth. If Iran is permitted
to reach a point where it can create its own nuclear weapons and put them on
their missiles, Israel will only be minutes away from an extermination that the
Iranian leadership and the other Muslim nations of the Middle East have openly
called for since Israel came into being and the Islamic Revolution took control
of Iran in 1979.
This time, however, the same nuclear
weapons that would destroy Israel would also be turned on the United States
because the shouts of “Death to America. Death to Israel” are a part of the
daily lives of the Iranians, as well as others in the
region.
What makes these days so dangerous is
that the United States of America is engaged in negotiations with an Iran that
has never made a secret of their intention to be a nuclear-armed nation. What
makes these days so dangerous is that the President of the United States has
barely hidden his own anti-Semitism and animus toward Israel.
One can only pray that seventy years
hence some other writer will not be commenting on the second great annihilation
of the Jews, literally within the lifetime of people who were alive during the
first one. I am one of those people and Auschwitz is not some place that existed
a long time ago. It was yesterday.
© Alan Caruba, 2015
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