Before the holocaust 250,000 Jews lived in France.
By the end of the war 75,000 of them, including men, women and children, had been rounded up in French cities and towns, put onto trains, and taken to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.
In 1938 the U.S. initiated a conference of 32 nations to discuss the situation European Jews were facing. All of them decided not to take Jews into their country in large numbers.
Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, would say of what the Jews faced after the conference: “The world seemed to be divided into two parts — those places where the Jews could not live, and those where they could not enter.”
This is the story Ellen Kennedy, a law professor here in MN, told in an article printed in last week’s Star Tribune.
She went on to say, “Ordinary French men and women created the laws that made this happen, denounced their friends and neighbors, took belongings from the Jews’ vacated apartments, drove the trains to Auschwitz, and supported the Nazi effort to rid Europe of every single one of the continent’s Jews.”
That is a chilling indictment of “ordinary French men and women.”
Imagine such a legacy. Thousands of French men and women today had parents and grandparents who were willing and silent participants in the most horrific event in human history.
Is there not a lesson in that for us Americans? Consider this.
Last week Jerry Falwell, Jr., the Chancellor of Liberty University, described his take on the killings in San Bernardino to students this way: “I’ve always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in. I just wanted to take this opportunity to encourage all of you to get your permit. We offer a free course. Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here.”
Earlier in the week in Spotsylvania, VA, civil engineer Samer Shalaby was presenting the building plans to residents for a new mosque that is to be built in the county when a man stood up and yelled: “Every one of you are terrorists. I don’t care what you say. You can smile at me, you can say whatever you want, but every Muslim is a terrorist.”
These incidents came on the heels of Donald Troop suggesting Muslim Americans should be put on a watch list, and then making up a story about New Jersey Muslims cheering when the Trade City Twin towers came down.
Ted Cruz kept up with Trump by arguing that we should only admit Christian Syrians as refugees.
But here’s the kicker. After making these statements both Trump and Cruz went up in polls taken among likely Republican voters.
This is the America we now live in…
Where “ordinary men and women” support narcissistic demagogues for president.
Where students applaud and cheer a pseudo-Christian when he advocates they start packing guns and ordinary men and women cheer a racist bigot when he calls a Muslim American a terrorist in a community meeting.
Where mass killings are a daily occurrence while gun sales are soaring.
Where propaganda is keeping our government from doing anything to develop a reasonable and humane immigration policy.
Yet we Americans are sure that as ordinary men and women we would never allow what happened to Jews in France and Germany and other European countries ever to happen to anybody here.
Never mind that the U.S. and Britain led all the other countries in that 1938 conference in refusing to take in Jewish refugees.
Never mind that our own history includes mass extermination of native Americans, perpetuating a system of slavery and then replacing it with the evil of segregation, and putting Japanese Americans into internment camps during WW II.
How can anyone believe the demagoguery being spewed out every day that is dominating the news is not leading us down a bad path again?
It seems to me that those who refuse to believe a similar thing can happen here in regard to Muslims and anyone else deemed “the other” are incredibly and dangerously naive.
The simple fact is, the ordinary French men and women Ellen Kennedy wrote about who allowed and supported the extermination of French Jews did so because the Nazi’s exploited their fears.
So when when I hear political and religious leaders and media personalities exploiting the fears of our people I become more convinced than ever that it not only can happen here in America, it already is.
linnposts.com 