by Prof. Eugene Narrett - copyright 2006

Western civilization is destroying itself; rather, it has been destroying itself for a long time. Despite its dynamism, creativity and productivity, wealth, superficial beauty and power, its main expressions, from Hellenistic Greece and imperial Rome to the European Union and, yes, to post-modern America, western civilization has been a spectacularly irrational suicidal process. Why?

A strikingly consistent feature of the West’s self-dissolution, particularly sharp during the past century, — the era of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and mass pogroms, the British Empire’s perversion of its Mandate for the Jewish National Home, the wide range of American and British admirers of the Nazis (from Henry Ford and Margaret Sanger to Joe Chamberlain), the shoah, the embargos and Road Maps, the consistent feature is the West’s animus against the Jews and Judaism.

This is both vicious and odd for the tap root, one could say in Scriptural idiom, the “tent” of Western civilization is Judaism. The forms, the categories of thought, the division of “knowledge” into disciplines are often Greek or Roman but the?hearth, the?ethics, laws, conception of human nature, its responsibility, freedom and dignity, the idea of a personal Creator Who hears prayer are Jewish. The division of life into secular and sacred, alien to Judaism, reflects a late stage of pagan Hellenism which in no small part was a reaction to 1) the perpetual internecine violence of the Greek city states and, 2) the violent and perverse immorality (from a Jewish viewpoint) of ancient Greek theology in which human beings are puppets or pipes for the gusts of stimulating and destructive passions breathed into them by warring gods; in which the world is violently and magically unstable, qualities represented in most digital era films.

As a first consideration of the major fact of all our lives, the suicide of the West and its obsession with attacking its Jewish taproot, here is a synopsis of the Greek theology first recorded by Hesiod (c. 540 BCE) in his Theogeny (lit. birth or “generations of the gods”).

Strikingly unlike Genesis, Hesiod gives several confused accounts of creation, some of them clearly borrowed from Judaism. But the main line of Hesiod’s account is that Earth, herself a goddess, Gaia, produced all the other gods, sometimes “without any act of love” (an ‘immaculate conception,’ — Athena and Dionysus, indeed many Greek gods and goddesses were born in some such manner) and sometimes via intercourse with her mate, Ouranos who is both her husband and her son. “Gaia’s first born was Ouranos, the starry sky…”

Perhaps because of his ambiguous and disturbing double status as father and son, Ouranos feared his children “who hated their father.” (Contrast this with the love that characterizes Abraham’s relation with His Creator Whom he recognizes as the immaterial Author of all there is, including space and time. Contrast it too with Abraham’s love for his children, all of them).

But in the ‘tent’ of Yavan [Hebrew word denoting the Greeks], children as well as wife hate the father and husband who fears them. This is not the paradigm of a culture that will endure. Moreover, this hatred leads the son, Kronos (”time” which in Greek thought is a son of earth, one of many aspects of Greek thought junked by science) to collude with his mother to castrate her husband, his father. And so he did, with “the enormous sickle” she prepared.

“And he [Kronos] lopped off the members of his own father and threw them to fall where they would, taken in by Gaia, the earth” from which she brought forth the “Furies” of blood vengeance and “the tall giants… But the members themselves he threw into the great wash of salt water… and?from the circles of white foam and the immortal flesh grew a girl, a modest lovely goddess, called Aphrodite [”foam”] because from the sea foam she grew and Philommedea, because she appeared from [loving, i.e. genital] members. And Eros went with her. And here is the privilege she holds first among gods and men: the whisperings of girls, smiles and deceptions, the delight and sweetness and flattery of love…” [Theogeny lines 165-207]

Greek civilization rested uneasily on the centrality of connubial treachery and hate expressed in castration; deracination (destruction of roots) is its first principle. And this treachery, hatred and deracination they conceived as the basis and origin of love, a condition and emotion they from the first?perceived as deforming, erotic, and deceitful. Aphrodite, conceived in a grotesquely violent and magical way embodies the bloody foam and members of her… well, what exactly is her relation to Ouranos? For Aphrodite literally is a female embodiment of castrated male members: as noted, their ideal of love is grotesquely violent and perverse.

What kind of future for fathers can there be in a culture with this founding myth? It is a future like our present, a culture of ‘no-fault’ divorce, of disposable fathers; of children crippled by a father dearth whose Hollywood icon is Darth Vader. Contrast this with the role of the Jewish father to his children, the love, teaching, and kindness that bind the generations in memory, identity, and awareness of the One, the unborn and the undying Who wants us to sanctify the world, not alternately worship and reject it.

In Hellenic sensibility, the quintessentially beautiful female form is a transmutation by blood and brine of castrated male members, the origin of the west’s self-negating ‘transgender’ manias, its long obsession with androgyny, and its eroticized mass “media” (cf. Philommedea) too. The resulting goddess, if goddess is an accurate description of Aphrodite, is according to many Greek texts (cf. The Bacchae, the last Classical Greek tragedy written, 401 BCE) “the only comfort and peace of suffering mankind.” The dominant ideas of original Greek thought are dissolution of self, mutation and mutilation as so horribly described in Ovid’s compendium, Metamorphoses as in plays like The Bacchae itself which demonstrate how literally the Greeks understood the need of their gods for a human scapegoat whose ritual dismemberment would produce both punishment and communion…

This primary text illustrates why that dazzling hybrid, western civilization, has been a long running war on the Jews and Judaism. Since the days of the Antiochus Epiphanes (a.k.a. Epimanes), nay, since Ptolemy Philadelphus had the Torah translated into Greek (a tragedy that resonates in Hamlet’s lines on how “a king can go a progress through the guts of a beggar”), Hellenic sensibility has been bursting through the tents of Shem, the Jewish ethos which briefly rescued Greco-Roman paganism and launched “western civilization.” Examples of this cultural theft are the West’s theology, a sanitized form of Hesiod’s theogeny;the demonization of Jews and resulting genocidal wars and pogroms ancient, medieval and modern; and the West’s pervading obsession with “progress,” forgetting, uprooting (as was done to the Jews as to the first Greek father-god, Ouranos; in general their preference for innovation over conservation. (The outwardly staid Ralph Waldo Emerson as much as the fiery, anti-social Jean Jacques Rousseau were intense advocates of progress and self-creation and were haters of the ’strangling’ quality of the past, as anti-Jewish a perspective as can be conceived). The Renaissance and then the Romantic exaltations of human will into desperate efforts to re-create and re-fashion human beings and society all reveal the pagan Greek nightmare bursting through the Jewish ethos of dignity, responsibility, respect for elders (not deification of youth), of teaching and learning, not rebelling… of dignity, personal humility and modesty, not fame and display.

The horrible Hellenic conception of erotic love is the negation of generation and family. The West’s glorification of this self-negating vision is part of the basis of its relentless war on Jews and its own self-destruction. We live it, and like Hamlet, like all people, we are tasked with “setting right” [tikkun olam] a time that we have not made and would not have chosen; we are on a badly “out of joint” stage which yet is the platform on which our challenges must be met and our souls refined.

Knowledge, courage, identity, recognition of the saving Jewish alternative is the only way out.

by Prof. Eugene Narrett - copyright 2006

Reading a report on the www.israelnationalnews.com home page informs us that the University of Pennsylvania at the eleventh hour quashed an art exhibit planned by a Jewish student. The exhibit documented the destruction of Jewish holy sites. Every reasonably alert, educated person knows that such destruction is a common and alarming feature of this historical period in Europe and throughout the Islamic world. Indeed, this destruction, a cultural genocide matching mass murder is an ugly story two millennia long. In recent decades the vilification and demonization of Jews has been and remains the modus operandi of the “Palestinian authority,” Fatah and Hamas.

The University banned the exhibit in the name of its policy of “zero tolerance for hate” and because the exhibit ostensibly did not provide “cultural diversity.” Sorry, but it’s impossible to find an Islamic state or region in which Jewish holy sites or Jewish lives are safe, protected and respected. The exhibit is a vital bit of historical documentation that our “tolerance” based society would be expected to back. So the University of Pennsylvania’s so-called policy of “zero tolerance for hate” actually is a familiar sort of politically correct Orwellian deceit: it is in fact and effect a policy of suppressing, humiliating, hating, silencing and marginalizing Jews and of hiding what Islamic states and organizations do to the Jewish people.

This treatment includes Islamic school textbooks that teach Muslim children that Jews are “the descendants of pigs and monkeys” and that “the virgins of paradise” will reward them for murdering Jews, crimes equated with “martyrdom.”

American higher education has been an oxymoron for nearly four decades and the rot has increased exponentially as political correctness has become entrenched and grown to include a blatant pro-Islamic bias. Partly this reflects a greedy, truth-be-damned desire for petro-dollars. Partly it reflects the hatred of one’s own roots that is intrinsic to leftist-feminism. But it also reflects something, now recrudescent, much older and more deeply embedded in the conflicted heart of western civilization.

It is getting worse. Jews be warned.

How ironic that this ban on Jewish education and documentation of the pillage of Jewish holy sites occurred as reports arrived that Muslims in Israel have AGAIN desecrated the tomb and memorial of first century Torah sage Rav Shimon ben Gamliel, one of the discussants in Pirkei Avot.

This essay is a call for TOTAL JEWISH DIVESTMENT AND DISINVESTMENT FROM ALL American institutions of so-called higher education and the re-channeling of money to new academies (there are plenty of excellent teachers, the present writer is one) that will teach Jewish history, history which is abundant and abundantly attested by many cultures; academies that will teach the conflicted origins of western culture and explain its long term decline and suicide, something that all Americans and peoples of the West urgently need to know.

This also is a call for American Jews to withdraw from the professions and seriously consider moving to the homeland of the Jewish people. Even one hundred thousand American Jews could turn around the suicidal path of subservience to America’s ruling elites that Israel has been trudging toward its ruin. In any case, it is increasingly clear that America, once so great, led by its post-modern ‘opinion makers’ and re-shufflers of the world has no place for Jews aware and proud of their heritage.

It’s time to leave. And meantime, to divest and disinvest from all American universities and try the intermediate step of founding and funding academies of true higher education that can make sense for students heading to all and any profession of what the culture is in which we all must make our way; of a genuinely classical education that will tell us who we are and can be.

As a first step, let the University of Penn and the Hillel there know your outrage at the stifling of Jewish history and free expression and of the blatant anti-Jewish bias of their Orwellian p.c. apologia. “They named it Egypt and left it.”

by Prof. Eugene Narrett - copyright 2006

In studying discussions and recommendations on Israel’s plight we often are astonished at the range and abundance of prescient analyses and warnings about the path set by the dominant factions of the reborn state, — and by the enmity of its neighbors and ‘friend.’

The following is no exception. It is excerpts, with some comments from today, from chapter 7 of my book, Gathered against Jerusalem: Essays on a False Peace (Writers Club Press, 2000). The text is description, analysis, warning and way out, with frequent reference to Torah, oral and written. Heroes from our days, and there are many, were quoted. We have seen them since; they need and deserve fellowship of every kind.

The enmity of western civilization and Islam, Esau and Ishmael only has increased since the original essays were penned. The good news and the bad news is that western civilization is committing suicide; the branch that attacked its [Jewish] root is withering and dying. But as it dies it comes full circle, having little energy left but to intensify attacks on Jews, Judaism and Israel, a fledgling in its attachment to Judaism. The good need to hold tight and do what’s right, — hold onto the heartland and holy hill that are the foundation of Judaism’s wedding of sanctification of human life. Jews must seek out to achieve all ways in which we can be “a single nation in the land upon the hills of Israel.â€?

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Now that Israel’s ruling elites are fronted by a political party whose very name is a lie, the epigraph to the original version of this essay is increasingly timely.And He said, ‘what do you see, Amos?’ I replied, ‘a basket of summer fruits [kayitz].’ Hashem then said to me, ‘the end [haKaitz] has come for my people, Israel. I will no longer continue to forebear them…â€?

While we know that there will not be a complete exile and destruction, the magnitude of the losses and suffering will depend on rectification of the lies and servitude beneath which the people of Israel are constrained to bend. The genocidal abuse of and contempt for the Jewish people by the powers great and small, east and west during the past century show abundantly and chillingly that Israel must save itself.

Here is an example of the degree of servitude that continues to this day….

“Three days before Hanukkah 5760, an American woman was arrested atop the Temple Mount by police of the Muslim Waqf, allowed by Israel’s government to set conditions upon Judaism’s holiest site. They interrogated her, accused her of conspiring to destroy the Dome of the Rock, and handed her to Israeli police who booked her… for the crime of closing her eyes and informed her that this is considered ‘an act of prayer’ forbidden to Jews on the Mount. Such are the costs of the political, judicial and religious leaders having preferred the ‘wailing wall’ to God’s holy hill.

“On 20 Kislev, the Arabs opened a gateway, 12 meters wide from within the south side of the Mount. The government had known for three months, noted a Likud MK that excavation was going on with cranes and bulldozers hollowing out the inside of the hill. Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute commented to Arutz-7 that “the Arabs not only deny our history with words, they are erasing the physical evidence that there was a [Jewish] Temple there.

“The ‘Peace Bloc’ [Gush Shalom, which should be called a ‘war party’ for its encouragement of the Islamic jihad against Judaism] demanded that the government declare ‘the Temple Mount is a Moslem area and that Israel has no intention of intervening there.’ Public Security Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami said that if Israel used force, ‘it would cause the whole city to burn.’

“Another official response, from Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein was perhaps most significant. ‘We have lost control of the Temple Mount,’� he commented with the inaccurate and perhaps disingenuous dismay which is one of the tactics by which the elites seek to dishearten the Jewish people.

But he was and is right that “the remnants of the history of the Jewish people are being trampled.� This process has continued since the days of Barak though with less emphasis on loss of holy sites and more on loss of Jewish lives. As one political and legalistic betrayal has followed another, Israel has moved from the intoxicating and befuddling semantics of Barak’s “simultaneity and momentum� (“it’s on to the end of the end game� he chirped on Charley Rose’s show in NYC in spring 2000) to Sharon’s “disengagement� and Olmert’s “convergence.� All are code words for the gentile and Hellenist project of blotting out the name and memory of Israel, a project essential to their goal of blotting out name, memory, and national boundaries (with the traditions and loyalties that reflect) all over the world.

The “final status talks� which the Clinton Administration pushed ever more feverishly as it approached its stall gave place to the Saudi – Bush administration Road Map and its “security fence,� a nostrum first touted by establishment ‘conservatives’ like George Will and Charles Krauthammer (fall 2001). All, all are names for what the British did to the Jewish National Home during the Mandate: roll it back to indefensible borders. It is a labyrinth at the rotten heart of which waits an insatiable pagan Minotaur.

“The world is waiting for the Jewish people to heed the words of Haggai. No amount of Jewish diffidence will erase this responsibility or placate the Arabs who know in their hearts that they indeed are trespassing on the Mount� and in the land generally. “Jews must close their eyes in prayer and then open them ‘to see retribution on the wicked.’ No longer arrested, they will be bless and praised, “a crown of splendor in the hand of Hashem and a royal headdress in the palm of your God� (Isaiah 62:3).

The religious, the “dati� will shed true knowledge and insight and bring merits of the true crown to Israel when they restore this connection of the heart broken by the brokers of political favors and geopolitical blackmail. The West will not save Israel: it will not even save itself. Only renewed Judaism, linking prayers and deeds will save it.

Dr. Eugene E. Narrett
Excerpts are from Gathered against Jerusalem: Essays on a False Peace pages 40-5.
See www.iuniverse.com

by Prof. Eugene Narrett - copyright 2006

“That which we have heard to be true and our fathers told us, we shall not withhold from their sons — recounting unto the final generation the praises of Hashem, His might and His wonders that He has wrought. He established a Testimony in Jacob and a Torah in Israel which He commanded our fathers to make known to their sons, so that the last generation may know, — sons yet to be born — they will mature and tell their own sons…” [Psalm 78:3-6]

The essence of Pesach is reading and discussing the Haggada, the story celebrating the redemption of the Jewish people from Egypt, to receive the Torah and “be a free people in our land.” Rambam established the halacha that “in every single generation, one must show himself as if he had personally left Egypt” (Hilchot Chametz u’Matza 7:6). As translator and prisoner of Zion Daniel Pinner comments, “the reading of the Haggada, and the explanations thereof, must be a living and dynamic experience,” thoughts, beliefs, and actions must be unified just as Judaism is a unified way of life, of understanding and being.

Of course, if fathers and sons are separated this essential rejuvenation and unification of the entire people and its purpose is impaired; & cannot truly occur. Such separation violates the continuity of the generations, the chinuch (education), the mixture of joy, remembrance and identity that makes a Jew. A Jewish child must be able to look up into his father’s eyes every night; especially on the nights of telling the Haggada… Because the Hebrew root of chinuch, education is “grace,” a wise and beautiful insight, than the grace of Pesach, re-connecting the bond of the Creator and His people through their generations is rooted in this connection of fathers teaching their sons.

Everyone living in America (indeed, in all the Anglophone nations) and in Israel in our days knows that ‘father-optional’ families have been the standard for thirty years. ‘Disposable dads,’ expelled from their homes by the “no-fault” divorce industry and its self-serving, stone-hearted judges, lawyers, and feminist ‘advocates’ are creating nations in a free fall toward disaster, nation in which it is routine for children to be deprived, usually without cause, by whim and hearsay, of the love, guidance, teaching and security of a father’s daily presence.[1]

As Israel will not survive the Supremacist, activist - Pharaonic court, State Department flunkies in the Knesset or the anti-Jewish agenda of the media and other modernist groups, neither will Israel nor any nation survive the anti-father agenda at the suicidal core of western civilization [2]. How can it, when the assault on fathers is essential to western civilization’s Greek myths and violent, perverse theogeny that have been hacking for over two millennia at the Jewish roots onto which they were audaciously grafted.

How much worse then, how suicidal (like other trends in Israel and among Jews in recent decades) that this ethnic cleansing of fathers is routine in the nation whose identity, continuity, concept of sovereignty and memory depends on the connectedness of fathers and sons, fathers and their children.

A father cannot “show” his sons and daughters what it is like to leave Egypt when he is not there; he cannot show them because the STATE shows the children the opposite when it expels a father from his home and makes him a ‘visitor’ in his children’s lives, usually because the wife has chosen the ‘father-optional’ plan so celebrated in mass culture, and not only in mass culture… The STATE and its legal elites, and too many women show their children that their father is a nuisance, an irrelevance, an alternate weekend baby-sitter, not a teacher, not a living presence and source of authority and object of respect… Yes, it is common.

Suddenly innocent and loving fathers are expelled from their homes. How many expelled fathers thought of this in the terrible days last summer when the criminal expulsion of Jews, sinat chinam and without cause or excuse was an example of what millions of fathers have suffered for three decades to almost universal silence and with the media, to the extent that they notice at all, cheering on the deadly process and vilifying its victims.

The very last prophet of the Jewish people warned that “a day, burning like an oven” would come when the hearts of fathers and children had been separated from each other and thus from Hashem, when grace had been driven from Israel. They must be re-united to turn the entire nation to Hashem in Jewish renewal. “Or else Eliyahu will smite the land with destruction!” And what does Israel face these past 35 years that it has turned from its roots, turned from the primacy of the father-child bond and from everything it requires and represents? It faces DESTRUCTION, suicide, uprooting, the Hellenistic, antifamily cultural paradigm of perversions and madness….

This Pesach, Jews can consider how deeply we are in bondage by considering how many fathers and children are forcibly, needlessly and illegally separated from each other, another irreplaceable year. They can consider the ways this fact is ignored, trivialized or misrepresented; consider yet another way the nation is being destroyed so irrationally; they can and should consider what the Haggada says about fathers in families and the life, pride, joy, education, grace and freedom of the nation, and about rebirth.

Then and only then we will have from Hashem, “a sun of righteousness with healing in its wings.” Soon, it is needed very soon.

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1 see Dr. Sanford Braver, “Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths; the Surprising Truths about Fathers, Children and Divorce” (Tarcher - Putnam, Penguin, 1998). This text is the most comprehensive extant survey of divorce.

2 See Hesiod’s Theogeny [”the generations of the gods”] and my writings on their place in western civilization, e.g. “Why the West Wars on the Jews: Origins I, Love” or “Western Civilization’s problems with Memory, History and Survival.”

by Prof. Eugene Narrett - copyright 2006

Many Jews in Israel assume that the American government will somehow rescue or help rescue them from the existential predicaments of the “land for [promises of] peace” deals. Since ‘the Rogers Plan’ that picked up the Israeli government’s own designation of the Jewish heartland as ‘bargaining chips’ “responsible” diplomacy in the Middle East has featured the odd desire of Israel’s elites for ‘recognition’ from inveterate foes and the “good offices” of America’s Executive Branch as the facilitator of the exchange.

In regard to this lopsided and suicidal process, Jews, and not only those in Israel should note at least two main points: 1) the various forms of the “peace process” are identical to the Arab demand that became explicit no later than during the Peel Commission hearings of 1936-7: NO Jewish state of any size is acceptable to them. To this day this continues to be their explicit and emphatic policy with Hezbollah, Hamas, Fatah and others vying to lead the war of extermination against Israel and the Jews.

It is in this context that the soporific promises of “convergence” and the “support” of soon-to-be lame duck President George W. Bush need to be considered. Even in the announcement we hear that the world will not (or need not) “recognize” the newly shrunken boundaries that a Kadima-led government will impose upon Israel. This should alert everyone that the familiar problems will continue: there will be retreat, alienation of territory and birthright, and no official acknowledgement even of Israel’s existence. (Some would say that such a self-alienation can have no other result). It resembles the attitude of the British Foreign Office official who in 1948 stated that “Israel is not a nation; therefore it cannot be invaded.” *

Even as the affiliates of Islamic Jihad turn Israel into carnage, the official word from “the world community,” led by Britain and the EU will be that Israel is the aggressor. Israel’s “best friend,” good old Uncle Laban will call for “an end to the cycle of violence” while the Jews “converge” upon Tel Aviv, looking for boats.

Forewarned is forearmed, at least it is for people who want to live. And especially for Jews, there is no life without “being a free people in [their entire] land.” Partitioning it, contorting it into switchbacks, doglegs, pseudopodia, corridors and bottlenecks only makes it indefensible. Even if the “wall” were straight, it would be a deterrent mainly to the movements of the IDF attempting to respond to attacks. That is the deal, a raw and bitter one.

Second main point, 2) studying the history of what the British did to the Jews, in Mandatory “Palestine” and in Europe from 1920 onward, and what America did in complementary fashion beginning at least with the Evian conference in 1938 demonstrates conclusively that the two greatest western powers, the Anglo-American alliance committed to a vague and half-hearted “war on terror” (that its elites actually do much to support) are not the true friends but the betrayers and enemies of Israel and of the Jewish people generally.

One could write many books on this critical topic (one will be appearing this summer); but for now, consider just a few of the material in one of the most central of these texts, David S. Wyman’s “America and the Holocaust: the Abandonment of the Jews, 1941-45” (1984, W. W. Norton; 1998 revised with new and fascinating Afterword that illuminates how the major media distort or bury history in order to create official ‘facts.’ See also Laurel Leff, “Buried by the Times,” 1995, and the fine web site of the Wyman Institute).

Wyman’s text makes plain that the betrayals of the “land for peace” deals since 1968 are a continuation of a malicious, homicidal contempt for Jews fully visible during WW II and the shoah. Let’s consider the two periods, then and now, in relation for a bit…

By June of 1942, members of the Jewish Labor Bund who had escaped from Poland to Switzerland and German industrialists with dealings in Poland and the Alpine nation had conveyed to London that the German-led extermination of Europe’s Jews was progressing. On the morning of August 08, 1942, further confirmation of these reports came to American consulate in Geneva where Vice Consul Howard Elting personally received a briefing stating, in part, that already the Germans had transferred nearly four million Jews to Poland for extermination, “all Jews from Germany and German occupied areas in Europe” were to be murdered. Elting “considered the report fantastic” Wyman writes, “though it did mesh exactly with the recent [and widely publicized] deportations of Jews from Holland, France and elsewhere in western Europe.

On August 11, officials at the State Department in Washington “dismissed Riegner’s disclosures as war rumors” even though the head of the Polish Government in exile, General Sikorski already had received numerous such reports and publicly called on America and Britain to threaten and bomb the Germans in retaliation. London Foreign Office officials sat on the addtional information for a week. Reprisal bombing for the shoah never occurred.

Later, US Secretary of State, Sumner Welles called Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise (whose “shtadlanut” were considered by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver to be “weak-kneed and a disaster”) to downplay the news. Rabbi Wise, a major booster of FDR, was lulled by Welles’ insistence that the additional eyewitness stories, if true at all, probably only reflected “the Nazi government’s intention to use Jews for labor…” precisely the official German story.

That’s the “help” of the US state department even faced with abundant evidence. Not very different from today when first the PLO - Fatah and now Hamas have become the interlocutors with whom Israel is put in virtual moral equivalence and to whom (and also to al Qaida, this is hardly classified information) it is commanded to yield ancient Jewish land including all, or all but one, of Judaism’s holiest sites.

Yes, the peace process is not only a war on Israel and the Jews, but a religious war against Judaism.

Wyman’s and related texts provide more details filling this pattern. Consider here just a tiny bit more. Keep in mind Secy of State Welles’ brutally cavalier remarks in light of the fact that the Polish government-in-exile in London was receiving daily coded cablegrams from Bern (Switzerland) and frequent diplomatic couriers which brought information on German war and extermination plans from eastern Europe to New York and London from early 1942 onward.

One of the ‘more sensitive’ Roosevelt administraton officials proposed allowing a “temporary safe haven” in the Virgin Islands to “perhaps 2000 refugee Jews.” Roosevelt turned it down. So also with a request to funnel $12,000 / month through Portugal for food aid to the four million and more Jews in Poland. Dean Acheson killed this “relief” effort of about two cents / month / Jew.

It’s instructive in discerning the genuine agenda of America’s ruling elites to contrast the official attitudes and proposals today to amnesty and/or naturalize eleven - twenty million illegal immigrants (with countless more in future) many of whom make no secret of their hatred of or hostile designs toward America and its sovereignty. What kind of people do America’s ruling elites welcome, fund and apologize for and whom did and do they keep out? It is a curious contrast that sheds light on the contradictory and erratic way the war on terror is defined (or not defined) and pursued.

In that September 1942, a Swedish businessman who had recently traveled throughout Poland provided detailed information on the mass separation of families and gassing to death of thousands of Jews each day from the ghettos in Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow and Lvov. That same month, the State Department received photostats of semi-coded letters smuggled out of the Warsaw ghetto which spoke of the activities of “Mr. Jagr” (”hunter,” — the Germans), and troubles of “uncle Achenu” (”our brothers” — the Jews) and the increasing work of “Uncle Gerush” (”deportation,” an uncle whose grandchildren recently are active in Israel). Secretary Welles declined to share the news with the press. Everything was done to downplay what actually was happening, to downplay the USA’s ability to do anything about it, and to overplay the negative consequences of actually helping. It is as today when the benefits of encouraging or assisting the Arabs to ‘make aliyah’ to an Islamic state are downplayed (as are the benefits of vigorous and pro-active military initiatives against terror (Ariel Sharon pledged this method in 2000), and the dangers of both grossly overstated.

The people in both cases must be lulled to sleep, anaestheticized, given a warm ‘toddy’ of ‘convergence’ and “process” while the Titanic sinks…

Let’s end this sad overview with a summary of the agenda of the Bermuda Conference that the W. Churchill and FDR Administrations finally were pressed into convening to quiet down the steadily building demand that something be done (for example, purchase from Roumania of the 70,000 Jews still alive in detention there. Romania had offered them for $50/head). The British were appalled that any rescue might be initiated:

“What if Hitler accepted a proposeal to release millions of unwanted person, we might find ourselves in a very difficult position… we should be made to look exceedingly unwise…” Mr. Peake then added, “many of the refugees are empty mouths [n.b. the Germans called them “useless eaters”; apparently the British were comfortable adopting the description] for which Hitler has no use. We would be relieving him of the obligation to care for these useless people…” (Wyman pp. 114-15).

This is part of what it means to be slaves and not free; this is part of what it means to cede decisions over Jewish land and sovereignty to the mighty powers of the West. To be defined by your benefactors as “useless people,” a perennial problem.

“Approaches to the Axis satellite countries” that, seeing the war tipping clearly toward the western allies already were signalling their willingness to release their Jewish populations, “were not discussed at all” by the Anglo-American teams at Bermuda. The British also demanded, successfully, that their policy of restricting (essentially banning) Jewish immigration into the Jewish National Home “would not be discussed at the conference.”

And what now of Jewish immigration into the heartland of Israel? The Bush administration forbade it in 2001. There was a direct line from the Pharaonic decree to Amona… Both are extensions of British Mandate policy.

In sum, the agenda of the Bermuda conference was that, 1) “no approach be made to Hitler for release of potential [Jewish] refugees; 2) to discuss the possiblility of obtaining neutral shipping [almost nothing was done here though the resources were large]; 3) a “request that the British review admitting Jews to Cyrenica [Libyan coast] would be considered” [it came to nothing]; 4) “discuss suggestions for removing [the 3500] Jewish refugees already in Spain; 5) a potential “joint Allied declaration on postwar repatriation of refugees” [i.e. anyhwere but the Jewish National Home].

I refer readers of Wyman’s 1998 edition (strongly preferred) to the last chapter there, “Responsibility” whose discussion of the treatment of the 1000 [!] Jewish refugees from Europe (many of them with American children, including in the American armed services) that FDR allowed into America, to Camp Oswego on Lake Ontario in December 1945 for further evidence of the place of Jews in the post war World envisioned by America’s foreign policy establishment.

Reports state the Mr. Olmert has received “permission” from London, Washington, and Brussels [the EU] for a ‘major attack’ on Islamic terrorists in Gaze by the end of Pesach. A major attack indeed is urgently needed. But if Israel’s government lets it be used as a rubber stamp, and Israel as a chit in great power games then the prognosis both for the state and the Jewish presence in it is grim. There is no freedom and little life without sovereignty…

It’s Pesach, the foundational festival of the Jewish nation, faith, practice, and journey to freedom in its Promised Land. Get a copy of Wyman’s text to study during Chol HaMoed or after the holiday and ponder the connection of freedom / sovereignty to life and of slavery to death. It’s a lesson, the lesson for our time: b’yamim haheim, bazman hazeh [“in those days, at this seasonâ€?].

Dr. Eugene E. Narrett

* Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial (Harper, 1984)