Israel Matzav

FDR told Stalin he'd like to give America's 6 million Jews to Saudi King

Unlike most Jews of my generation, I grew up knowing that Jewish love for Franklin Delano Roosevelt was misplaced.

As a child (probably 6th grade or so), I read Arthur Morse's While Six Million Died. I knew that FDR could have bombed Auschwitz. I knew that he had been begged to do so by the real Jewish leadership (by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein among others), and that he refused to even meet with them. I knew that he knew by 1942 exactly what was happening to European Jewry. And I knew that he did nothing.

What I did not know explicitly - until now - was that St. Franklin, the idol of 'rabbi' Stephen Wise and the reform movement, was a rank anti-Semite. Here's Daniel Greenfield quoting from a new essay by Rafael Medoff.

Had the State Department simply left in the passage about Jews, it might have attracted less notice. Instead, the obvious omission intrigued observers. The New York Times reported that Roosevelt and Stalin discussed Soviet Jewry, Zionism, and the Soviet attempt to establish a Jewish “homeland” in the Siberian region of Birobidzhan.

The Times correspondent then added: “It is not entirely clear from the text why Stalin began talking about the Jewish problem. A line of asterisks preceding Stalin’s statement seems to raise the possibility that one of Stalin’s high-level colleagues may have initiated the discussion of Jews with a statement that has been censored from the published text.”

As it would turn out, it was a statement by Roosevelt, not one of Stalin’s aides, that had been censored.

The mystery deepened two days later, when the Washington Post published an editorial criticizing the deletions as “pernicious” and an attempt to “doctor history.” It noted that among the deletions were “some remarks by President Roosevelt about the Jews,” although it did not spell them out. “In historical perspective, President Roosevelt will have to be judged as a whole man, indiscretions and all,” the Post argued.

Three days later, the text of FDR’s censored statement was published, by U.S. News and World Report. It reported that when Roosevelt mentioned he would soon be seeing Saudi Arabian leader Ibn Saud, Stalin asked if he intended to make any concessions to the king; “The President replied that there was only one concession he thought he might offer and that was to give him the six million Jews in the United States.”

...

Published last year in this author’s FDR and the Holocaust, it derives from a conversation in 1939 between President Roosevelt and Senator Burton Wheeler (D-Montana), concerning possible Democratic candidates for president and vice president in 1940.  Towards the end of the meeting, the president expressed doubt that a ticket composed of Secretary of State Cordell Hull for president and Democratic National Committee chairman Jim Farley for vice president could be elected. Wheeler responded (according to a memorandum he composed following the meeting):

I said to the President someone told me that Mrs. Hull was a Jewess, and I said that the Jewish-Catholic issue would be raised [if Hull was nominated for president, and Farley, a Catholic, was his running mate]. He said, “Mrs. Hull is about one quarter Jewish.” He said, “You and I Burt are old English and Dutch stock. We know who our ancestors are. We know there is no Jewish blood in our veins, but a lot of these people do not know whether there is Jewish blood in their veins or not.”

Read the whole thing. Medoff's full essay is here. Curiously, it does not mention Hillary Clinton.

Labels: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Holocaust, Saudi Arabia

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:39 PM