Biden Should Quash Abbas’s Newest Offensive

(Republished with author’s permission from the Algemeiner news website) 

In December both Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Vladimir Putin each called for the Quartet on the Middle East to be the sponsor of future negotiations. But why? The Quartet was established in Madrid in 2002 and is comprised of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia. It has been irrelevant for many years — at least since May 2015 when Tony Blair officially resigned from his role as Special Envoy for it and very arguably long before that. The Biden administration will have the chance to have the U.S. leave the Quartet and it should exercise the opportunity as soon as possible before Abbas’s offensive on the Quartet’s behalf sees success.

A review of the Quartet’s website is instructive in examining why Abbas has been so vocal lately about his support for the Quartet’s increased involvement. The entire approach of the Quartet to the conflict is contrary to Israel .

The tagline that is included at the top of every page of the Quartet’s website is “supporting the Palestinian people to build the institutions and economy of a viable, peaceful state in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

It’s important to break down that sentence.

First, the tagline does not mention Israel at all. That, in and of itself, is an important fact that cannot be defended in any way. How can you be about making peace between two sides and ignore the very existence of one side?

Second, Israel’s major cities and Ben-Gurion International Airport would be within easy rocket range of terrorists sitting on the Palestinian side of the border of a “West Bank” state. Who honestly believes that a new Palestinian government would stamp out the terrorists? Does anybody remember the Oslo Accords, which obligated the Palestinian Authority to outlaw and disarm all terrorists? Who enforced that? Who will enforce future Palestinian compliance?

Not only that, but by linking the Hamas-controlled Gaza terror statelet that now exists with a proposed entity in Judea-Samaria (what the Quartet partisanly labels the “West Bank”) and the Quartet necessitates the creation of a tunnel and/or railway linking Gaza to the P.A.-run territories. Such territorial contiguity would endanger Israel’s security is a very widely accepted fact by Israel’s defense policy establishment.

And that is in part because a tunnel and railway would slice across Israel’s middle and would connect, and thereby significantly strengthen, the potential military capacity of these two perennially hostile anti-Israel regimes. Hamas already takes advantage of every current opportunity to send terrorists from Gaza into Judea and Samaria, so just imagine what it would do if it is given a highway and railway tunnel system through which it could send whatever it wants.

If Israel tried to interfere with Palestinian Arabs using that corridor, it would become the subject of severe international condemnation. The United Nations would almost surely threaten sanctions, as would the European Union. Under such pressure, Israel would hesitate to act—thus effectively tying its hands in the face of a terrorist buildup.

Another issue with the Quartet’s mission statement that must be confronted is the use of a place named “East Jerusalem” when no such place has ever existed in Middle East history. The name “East Jerusalem” is an artificial construct that supporters of the Arab argument use in their propaganda to make it appear as if that part of the city is an intrinsically Arab area that Jews are illegally entering.

At the time Israel haters created the name “East Jerusalem” it was for one reason: They sought to rip Israel’s capital apart to defeat Israel. What it is that they are really saying with the term is that Jerusalem’s Old City and its surrounding neighborhoods are not part of Israel or part of Israeli Jerusalem itself. The original and oldest parts of Jerusalem are what they falsely label “East Jerusalem.”
Led by Mahmoud Abbas, the P.A. understands that the Quartet’s envoys and its bureaucracy are biased in their favor, even more so than the United Nations, and that is why Abbas is so focused on bringing the Quartet back into the picture. Abbas must be prevented from reactivating the Quartet as a player in Middle East affairs.

The Middle East’s political climate has changed remarkably in the last several years, largely due to the work of the Trump Administration’s Middle East team. One thing that the Biden administration can do to not squander what has been accomplished is to bring a swift end to U.S. sponsorship of the Quartet. It has shown that it is systemically incapable of being a fair arbiter as far as Israel is concerned. Ending US involvement in the Quartet will cause its collapse and that is a good thing.

A NATION IN PROTEST: Breaking The Illusion and The Need For A New Israeli Ethos

More than 15 years ago I was dragged out of the Neve Dekalim Synagogue by four soldiers and then bussed out of Gush Katif. In those moments I wondered why and where the protest movement to stop one of the largest injustices brought upon Israeli citizens by their own government had gone wrong.

The fact is, up until that point and including the Oslo protests headed by Moshe Feiglin, all of the nationalist protests had a sectoral feel to them. They weren’t meant to be sectoral, but Israel with all of its claims of the need for national unity breaks down along tribal lines and that is the failure of all of the protests in the past few years.

True, the disaster of the first Amona protest in 2006, when cops used horses to stampede settler youth, drew condemnation from the left, but the protest itself was not successful – meaning it did not strike a real chord with anyone else except settlers.

A lot has happened since then. Israelis know each other far better than before. Religious Zionists have penetrated the mainstream media and stand poised to take over the army in the next generation. All the while, both Chareidim and Religious Zionists find common ground on many issues.

Still, there appears to be a lack of real unity of purpose other than just survival or standing by while the country’s hi-tech leaders represent their craft as being indicative of the Israeli citizenry as a whole. The more we know each other, the more we realize we are all being pulled along together, without regard to whether or not we want to be heading where we are heading.

Perhaps the uniting factor in this new young generation, growing up in a post Gush Katif reality is the need for a new national ethos. Many settler youth reject their parents’ views that they need to conform to make it in Israel and like many on the left, they see the vacuous drive towards participation in the hi-tech ecosystem as being disconnected from the larger issues plaguing Israeli society.

This is where the intersection has arisen between the protests surrounding Ahuviya Sandak’s death, potentially at the hands of a negligent police and the disconnect many have in Israel from the government and the elite that rules it.

When Hill Top Youth were placed in administrative detention for six months over Duma and then tortured to be made to confess and still be found guilty despite an admittance that the confession came by way of torture – Israelis scratched their head.

True, most questioned it, but then went on with their life. What is going on now is a confirmation that the bias against the idealistic youth of Judea and Samaria is real and the “fringe opinions” over Duma might have had some legs to them after all.

The simple question is now beginning to be asked: Why all this trouble over a handful of teenagers that seem to be only focused on defending Jewish land from Arab squatters?

Why claim these kids are a threat to the entire nation?

The protests are growing, because people see that Ahuvia Sandak’s death is a symptom of a larger problem in Israel. True, we lead the world in innovation, but we are beginning to lose site of what guides us here in the Land in the first place. We have come home, but have buried the vessels of Redemption in the sands of the Negev.

The youth are showing us something else – that rights are not given to us by the police, the judges, or even the Knesset, but rather they are given to us by G-D himself.

In a sense, the hate for these youth by the apparatchiks in the leftwing controlled security forces and judicial system stems from a sense of embarrassment and jealousy. After all, it is supposed their kids doing this – being Zionists, not these rag tag youth of the hills.

Yet, this goes beyond Zionism that guided Jews back to Israel – this is about Redemption itself. For that, one has to leave behind the trappings and false understandings fomented by those who built the early state, which were then foisted on everyone else.

In a sense we have to leave the construct of our assumptions about what we are doing here to see past the illusions that the governing institutions wants us to believe.

No one trusts the police here, yet before this past year there was too much at stake for all of the various groups to unite. Lockdown after ridiculous lockdown has taken its toll on the public and with it, the last remaining barrier that had prevented it from truly making grassroots change.

The youth of the hills are more than just guardians of the Land – they are messengers of a new way, which is really an old way. They are the David to the government’s Saul. We are not meant to come home to our Land and live like other Nations. Our soul’s are whispering that to us – trying to wake us up and these youth are the reminder that we can behave differently.

There is a price for conformity and that is the anonymity the machine wants us to fall into. However, these youth can and will save us from ourselves at the end. Most of us want something else, but we are just too afraid to admit it to anyone else. All of the technology and entertainment has done nothing to quiet the yearning for a shift to a Redemptive paradigm.

These protests are about regaining the process of reawakening what the Jewish return to its Land was supposed to be about. While this might be scary to many here, it is necessary if we are going to complete the transition from a nation like all other nations to one that is truly a Kingdom of Priests.

Has the Democrats’ push to depose Biden begun?

“A significant portion of the public does not believe that the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election was fairly conducted. … Once again, four justices on this court cannot be bothered with addressing what the statutes require to assure that absentee ballots are lawfully cast.” — Patience D. Roggensack, Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Dec. 14, 2020

“ … [A] majority of this court unconstitutionally converts the … Elections Commission’s mere advice into governing ‘law,’ thereby supplanting the actual election laws enacted by the people’s elected representatives in the legislature and defying the will of [the state’s] citizens. When the state’s highest court refuses to uphold the law and stands by while an unelected body of six commissioners rewrites it, our system of representative government is subverted.” — Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley, Dec. 14, 2020

“Investigators have been examining multiple financial issues, including whether Hunter Biden and his associates violated tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China. … Some of those transactions involved people who the FBI believe sparked counterintelligence concerns, a common issue when dealing with Chinese business … .” — CNNDec. 10, 2020

The November 2020 elections were an extraordinary event in which the bizarre, even the outlandish, became an integral part of the everyday humdrum routine.

The implausible and even more implausible?

This is not a politically partisan observation for it is valid no matter which side of the Democrat/GOP political divide one might happen to be on. After all, it is difficult to know what is more implausibly far-fetched:

(a) that, as the Republicans claim, there was pervasive electoral fraud on a scale so massive that it determined—indeed, inverted—the outcome of the ballot; or (b) that, as the Democrats claim, as a lackluster and lackadaisical candidate, perceptibly frail and aging, Joe Biden genuinely managed to amass the highest number of votes ever in a presidential election, surpassing former U.S. President Barack Obama’s previous 2008 record by almost 12 million votes.

Making this latter scenario even more difficult to accept at face value is that Biden’s running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, was hardly an electrifying vote-getter, having being forced to drop out quite early on in her own party’s primaries for its choice of a presidential candidate. Indeed, Biden’s choice of Harris as his prospective vice president was, in itself, more than a little incongruous, as she had viciously excoriated him during the primaries for his record on race relations, complicity with segregationists and sexual impropriety, adamantly proclaiming that she believed the women who had complained about his unwanted sexual advances.

‘Many doubt the fairness of November elections’

Indeed, in light of his anemic, largely “no-show” election campaign, in which he studiously avoided articulating his position on a number of crucial issues, Biden’s apparent electoral achievement is even more bewildering. Indeed, referring to the Biden campaign, one media outlet observed dourly: “There is no surge of feeling, zero passion. … Instead, the closest thing to enthusiasm … among voters is resigned, faint praise. ‘He’s a decent man’ … but you can’t move the needle of history with flaccid decency.”

Another noted: “Biden’s performance [in exceeding Obama’s 2008 record] is incredible considering the voter enthusiasm, especially among young people, that his former boss had … .”

Accordingly, the sentiment expressed by the chief justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, Patience D. Roggensack, was hardly surprising when she warned: “A significant portion of the public does not believe that the Nov. 3 presidential election was fairly conducted.”

These words were part of Roggensack’s dissenting opinion in a hearing on several challenges by U.S. President Donald Trump to Wisconsin’s election results. Although the motion was rejected by a 4-3 vote, at least one of the majority justices is on public record as being vehemently inimical to Trump, and the decision was severely criticized by the dissenting minority as being judicially unsound.

Thus, Justice Annette Ziegler, wrote, “The majority seems to create a new bright-line rule that the candidates and voters are without recourse and without any notice should the court decide to later conjure up an artificial deadline concluding that it prefers that something would have been done earlier. … That has never been the law, and it should not be today.”

Abdicating constitutional duty

Disapprovingly, she chastised: “It is a game of ‘gotcha.’ I respectfully dissent, because I would decide the issues presented and declare what the law is.”

Accusing the majority of “abdication of its constitutional duty,” she lamented: “Unfortunately, our court’s adoption of laches as a means to avoid judicial decision-making has become a pattern of conduct. A majority of this court decided not to address the issues in this case when originally presented to us. … In concluding that it is again paralyzed from engaging in pertinent legal analysis, our court, unfortunately, provides no answer or even any analysis of the relevant statutes, in the most important election … of our time.”

Ziegler was at pains to underline: “To be clear, I am not interested in a particular outcome. I am interested in the court fulfilling its constitutional responsibility.”

Expressing grave concern over the majority’s indecision, Ziegler chided: “While sometimes it may be difficult to undertake analysis of hot-button legal issues—as a good number of people will be upset no matter what this court does—it is our constitutional duty. We cannot hide from our obligation under the guise of laches.”

Accordingly, she concluded that “the rule of law and equity demand that we answer these questions for not only this election, but for elections to come.”

Indeed, given the relative proximity of the court hearing to the actual ballot process, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in order to comply with the majority conditions for the motion to be heard on its merits, the Trump legal team would have had to submit its case against the alleged infractions before those infractions were committed.

Covering corruption or not?

The apparent judicial reluctance to deal with allegations of widespread fraud leads us to another manifestation of partisan reticence, that of the mainstream media in their pre-election coverage of news highly pertinent to the voters’ decision at the ballot box—which seems to have drastically subsided in the wake of the elections.

Arguably, this was best capsulated in the Dec. 10 headline in an established Tennessee daily: “Uninterested before the election, national media now find the Hunter Biden story worth mentioning.”

The ensuing editorial shrewdly observed: “Too late to help the voting public form an objective opinion about their presidential choice, the national media has suddenly decided that the Chinese business dealings of Hunter Biden are worth mentioning.”

It continued: “We have long believed—and said—that the younger Biden’s business dealings, and his father’s major or minor role in them, was at least a disqualifying criterion for the elder Biden’s presidential election. It is clear, after all, that the younger Biden would not have been involved with various businesses in the Ukraine and China over the last decade had his father not been vice president at the time.”

Indeed, it is clear.

In a grave reproach of the mainstream media, it asserted: “National media outlets knew before last month’s election that federal prosecutors had opened a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings with China, but they did not pursue the story.”

In a stinging rebuke, it charged“They also refused to further investigate the New York Post pre-election story about e-mails allegedly contained on the younger Biden’s laptop pointing to shady dealings between Joe Biden and Ukraine. … In truth, they withheld critical information from readers and viewers so that Biden might beat President Donald Trump, the man they l[o]ve to hate.”

‘Too disgusting to repeat’

For example, leaked recordings exposed CNN’s president and political director blocking coverage of the New York Post’s explosive exposé on Hunter Biden“s shady business dealings overseas.

Thus, on Oct. 14, political director David Chalian was heard on a conference call, instructing: “Obviously, we’re not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden.”

Just two days later (Oct. 16), CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, informed his staff: “I don’t think that we should be repeating unsubstantiated smears just because the right-wing media suggests that we should.”

On Oct. 22, in a televised discussion, CNN anchor Jeff Tapper told his colleague, Bakari Sellers, that “ … the right-wing is going crazy with all sorts of allegations about Biden and his family. Too disgusting to even repeat here.”

The Media Research Center (MRC) conducted a review spanning the period Oct. 14-22 of ABCCBSNBC’s evening and morning shows and their Sunday roundtable programs, as well as ABC’s and NBC’s townhall events with Biden and Trump.

According to MRC: “Out of a total of 73.5hours of news programming, there were less than 17minutes (16 minutes, 42 seconds) spent on the latest scandals involving Joe Biden’s son.”

To be precise, the media watchdog found that ABC devoted zero (!) seconds to the reported Hunter Biden scandals, NBC just six minutes, nine seconds, while CBS led the broadcast networks with a “still-measly 10 minutes and 33 seconds.”

All-pervasive ‘Russian disinformation’

Moreover, even when the Biden story was mentioned, it was, by and large, denigrated as “Russian disinformation” (see for example here and here).

On Oct. 19, Politico published a report, dramatically headlined “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

It commenced with the following unequivocal pronouncement: “More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of e-mails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’ ”

However, in the letter itself, the “former intel officials,” who—unsurprisingly—included the ardently pro-Biden and fervently anti-Trump John Brennan (former CIA director), and James Clapper (former director of National Intelligence), seem to be far less unequivocally clear-cut and strident. Indeed, they were at pains to insert a paragraph, clearly formulated to protect their professional “rear-ends”: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post … are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement. … [However], there are a number of factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement.”

This, of course, leaves the reader to puzzle over the question: If the “former intel officials” had no clue whether or not the e-mails were, in fact, authentic or the product of “Russian involvement,” how could they possibly make the determination that they were—and why would they lend they names and reputations to create a politically partisan impression, which, by their own admission, they could not substantiate?

Or were they counting on the assumption that few ever read beyond the headlines and the opening paragraph?

An abrupt change of heart

With the election over, there seems to have been a perceptible shift in the media attitude towards the allegations of malfeasance in the Biden family’s overseas business activities.

For example, CNN anchor Tapper seems to have undergone an abrupt change of heart as to the gravity of these allegations, having, prior to the election—as we have seen—dismissed them in the strongest possible terms. However, several weeks after the presidential election, with Biden preparing to become the 46th president, Tapper apparently had few qualms in raising the subject publicly and the Biden family’s business ties began to be gradually emerging as fair game to him (see here).

A similar shift in journalistic sentiment was evident in other media outlets.

Take, for example, The Los Angeles Times. As early as March 6, it ran an editorial headlined: “The GOP’s Senate investigation into Hunter Biden is a charade—and they know it,” proclaiming that the entire probe into the Biden’s far-flung business dealings was little more than flimsily disguised political shenanigans.

However, soon after the elections, this changed markedly.

On Dec. 9, LAT ran a report headlined: “Hunter Biden tax inquiry examining Chinese business dealings.” It disclosed that “the Justice Department’s investigation scrutinizing Hunter Biden’s taxes has been examining some of his Chinese business dealings, among other financial transactions.”

The report continued: “… The investigation was launched in 2018, a year before his father, Joe Biden, announced his candidacy for president”—i.e., months before the LAT editorial board dismissed GOP claims regarding the existence of such a probe as “a charade.”

Indeed, a little over a month after the polls had closed, it conceded that “the younger Biden has a history of business dealings in a number of countries, and the revelation of a federal investigation puts a renewed spotlight on the questions about his financial dealings that dogged his father’s successful White House campaign.”

Three days later (Dec. 12), LAT again raised the subject in a piece titled: “Hunter Biden subpoena seeks information on Burisma, other entities,” stating that a “subpoena seeking documents from Hunter Biden asked for information related to more than two dozen entities, including the Ukraine gas company Burisma … .” Significantly, it added: “The breadth of the subpoena, issued Tuesday, underscores the wide lens prosecutors are taking as they examine the younger Biden’s finances and international business ventures.”

The harbinger of far-reaching political change?

This post-election metamorphosis of media mood could also herald the onset of a far-reaching political shift within the Democratic Party.

After all, in contrast to the accusations against Trump of colluding with Russia and conniving with Ukraine, based largely on third-party hearsay and innuendo, the evidence accumulating against the Biden family seems far more solid and compelling, including firsthand witness accounts and emails whose authenticity have yet to be denied.

As coverage on the alleged Biden scandal continues—and certainly if it turns out that Biden has been untruthful over his complicity in his family’s questionable business operations—his continued incumbency is likely to be increasingly challenged until it is no longer tenable, and he is compelled to transfer power to Harris.

Of course, there will be those who discount this possibility as being beyond the bounds of probability. However, they would do well to bear in mind that the overwhelming preponderance of the ideo-political energy in the party comes from the more radical left-wing, which has already proven that it can assert its will on the party apparatus in the past.

Recently, rumblings for changes in leadership within the party have begun, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) calling for a structural change in the party and for the old guard to be replaced with younger legislators to promote the radical policies she advocates. Indeed, she has even called explicitly for the replacement of the party’s congressional leadership of both Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House.

Will frailty and mendacity ensconce Harris as president?

The contour lines of an approaching scenario in which Biden, exposed as both frail and mendacious, is forced to step down and concede the presidency to Harris are gradually coming into focus.

With an ever-more critical press and an ever-more radical intra-party opposition, we may well be on the cusp of a new American (or rather un-American) revolution—a revolution in which a cardboard-cutout president is driven from office by people imbued with a  political credo, forged by figures and ideas not only different from, but entirely contrary to, those that made America America.

It is indeed a scenario that risks transforming America into a de-Americanized post-America—an unrecognizable shadow of its former self.

That will be the terrible price the American electorate has inflicted on itself for submitting to the fit of puerile and petulant pique that molded its choice this November.

FDR, the Nazis, and the Jews of Morocco: A Troubling Episode

The normalization of relations between Israel and Morocco and the  U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara have stirred interest in the history of Morocco’s Jews, including during the Holocaust years.

Unfortunately, some pundits, in their enthusiasm over these developments, have misleadingly portrayed the Allied liberation of North Africa in 1942 as the simultaneous liberation of the region’s Jews from their Nazi and Vichyite persecutors. That narrative papers over the harsh reality of what happened after the Allies’ victory. The full story of how President Franklin D. Roosevelt treated the Jews in Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa is a deeply troubling chapter in his administration’s history.

On November 8, 1942, American and British forces launched “Operation Torch,” the invasion of German-occupied Algeria and Morocco. In just eight days, the Allies defeated the Nazis and their Vichy French partners in the region. American Jews expected that the liberation of North Africa would also mean liberation for the 330,000 Jews there.

In 1870, the French colonial authorities in Algeria had issued the Cremieux Decree, which granted equal rights to that country’s Jews after centuries of mistreatment by Arab rulers  (although it did not affect the Jews in neighboring Morocco). When the Vichyites took over North Africa in 1940, they abolished Cremieux and subjected all of the region’s Jews to a range of abuses, including restrictions on admission of Jews to many schools and professions, seizures of Jewish property and occasional pogroms by local Muslims that were tolerated by the government.

In 1941–1942, American Jewish newspapers carried disturbing reports that the Vichyites had built “huge concentration camps” in Morocco and Algeria to house thousands of Jewish slave laborers. The prisoners endured backbreaking work, random beatings by the guards, extreme overcrowding, poor sanitation, near-starvation and little or no medical care. According to one report, 150 Jews scheduled to be taken to the camps were so fearful of the conditions there that they resisted arrest and were executed en masse.

With the Allied victory, North African Jews — and their American coreligionists —expected the prisoners to be released and the Cremieux Decree reinstated for Jews living throughout the region. The American Jewish Congress optimistically predicted that the repeal of the Vichy-era anti-Jewish laws would follow the Allied occupation of North Africa “as the day follows the night.” But President Roosevelt had other plans.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS

At the beginning of “Operation Torch,” the Allies captured Admiral François Darlan, a senior Vichyite leader. FDR decided to leave Darlan in charge of the Allied-occupied North African territories in exchange for Darlan ordering his forces in Algiers to cease fire.

Many prominent liberals in the United States were appalled by this decision. “[It] sticks in the craw of majorities of the British and French, and of democrats everywhere, [that] we are employing a French Quisling as our deputy in the government of the first territory to be reoccupied,” an editorial in The New Republic protested.

The war was supposed to bring enlightened democracy to areas that had been under the boot of fascism — not keep the old tyrants in power.

Not only was Darlan still in power, but he also retained nearly all of the original senior officials of the local Vichy regime. Darlan did dismiss one Vichyite of note, Yves Chatel, the governor of Algeria — but promptly replaced him with Maurice Peyrouton, the very Vichy official who had signed the anti-Jewish laws of 1940. Together, Darlin and Peyrouton deep-sixed the Cremieux Decree and kept thousands of Jews in the slave labor camps.

Rumblings of concern began to surface in the American press. A December 17 editorial in the New York Timesexpressed doubt that Darlan really intended to bring about “the abrogation of anti-Jewish laws [and] release of prisoners and internees.” The editors of The New Republic asked on December 28, “Who controls French Africa, Darlan or the [Allies]? And if the latter, isn’t it high time we cleaned up the remnants of fascism that obviously still exist there?” An investigative report in the New York City newspaper PM on January 1 asserted that the Darlan regime was actively discriminating against Jews, and “thousands” remained “in concentration camps.”

President Roosevelt publicly claimed that he had already “asked for the abrogation of all laws and decrees inspired by Nazi governments or Nazi ideologists.” But he hadn’t. When reporters questioned him at a January 1, 1943 press conference, FDR replied, “I think most of the political prisoners are — have been released.” But they hadn’t.

NO RIGHTS FOR JEWS

The official transcript of FDR’s meeting with Major-General Charles Nogues, a leader of the post-Vichy regime, in Casablanca on January 17, 1943, provides some insight into the president’s thinking.

Nogues asked President Roosevelt about demands by North African Jews for voting rights. According to the stenographer, Roosevelt replied, “The answer to that was very simple, namely, that there just weren’t going to be any elections, so the Jews need not worry about the privilege of voting.”

The transcript continues, “The President stated that he felt the whole Jewish problem should be studied very carefully and that progress should be definitely planned. In other words, the number of Jews should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population.”

FDR explained that he wanted to make sure the Jews would not “overcrowd the professions.” He pointed to what he called “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.”

In reality, Jews comprised about 16% of the lawyers, 11% of the doctors, 3% of the college professors and less than 1% of the schoolteachers in Germany. It’s striking that the president of the United States was so quick to believe the wildly exaggerated numbers — and to conclude that German hatred of Jews therefore was justified.

AMERICAN JEWS SPEAK OUT

As the weeks turned into months and as the fascists remained in power in North Africa, public criticism of the Roosevelt administration intensified.

Near-daily reports by I. F. Stone in PM featured headlines such as “U.S. Policy in North Africa: Why State Dept. Holds Up Repeal of Nuremberg Laws,” and “Hull Admits Anti-Fascist Prisoners Still Being Held in North Africa.”

Reports in the New York Times and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Daily News Bulletin began citing, by name, the camps where North African Jews and political refugees were being enslaved — including one that was just five miles from where “American troops, dedicated to end government by concentration camp, live.”

American Jewish leaders were strongly supportive of President Roosevelt — and some 90% of Jews voted for him repeatedly — but his perpetuation of the persecution of North African Jews was just too much. On February 14, 1943, the American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress took the unprecedented step of publicly denouncing the president’s North Africa policy.

In a joint public statement, the two groups charged that “the anti-Jewish legacy of the Nazis remains intact in North Africa.” Despite three months having passed since the Allied liberation, only a few “grudging concessions have been made” to aid the Jews, while no changes “of an important character have been made in the[ir] political and economic situation.”

The statement reminded the president that he had pledged “action to insure that the four freedoms shall without further delay be declared as valid for all the peoples in North Africa, which means the total abrogation of all anti-Semitic laws and decrees and … the release of those of whatever race or nationality who are being detained because of their support of democracy and opposition to Nazi ideology.”

The remarkable statement from those two mainstream Jewish organizations was only slightly milder than the charge by Benzion Netanyahu, executive director of the militant U.S. Revisionist Zionists (and father of the current prime minister of Israel), that “the spirit of the Swastika hovers over the Stars and Stripes” in the administration of North Africa.

Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the founder and longtime leader of the American Jewish Congress, then led a delegation to Washington to personally make their case directly to U.S. officials, and Wise’s co-chair, Dr. Nahum Goldmann, organized a group of prominent French exiles in the United States to present the State Department with a petition of their own.

The Union of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform) also called on the administration to intervene against the Vichyites. These protests induced a number of other prominent individuals to speak up, among them Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the exiled French Jewish leader Baron Edouard de Rothschild and leaders of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

AGONIZING DELAYS

In March 1943 — more than four months after the Allies liberated Morocco and the rest of North Africa — the Roosevelt administration finally instructed the local authorities to repeal the anti-Jewish measures.

The implementation process, however, was agonizingly slow. In April, the forced labor camps in North Africa were officially shut down — yet, in reality, some of them continued operating well into the summer.

The Jewish quotas in schools and professions were only gradually phased out. It was not until October 20, 1943, that the Cremieux Decree was at last reinstated. After ten long months of presidential stalling and stonewalling, this disturbing chapter in American foreign policy finally came to a close.

The increased public interest in the history of North African Jewry is a welcome byproduct of Israeli-Moroccan normalization. But discussions of that history should include its less pleasant side; that part, too, has important lessons to offer.

MUSLIM EXTREMIST SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN INVITED TO JEWISH EVENT

Salam Al Marayati

A Muslim-American extremist has been disinvited from a Jewish-organized civil rights panel, and Jewish liberals are denouncing his removal as a suppression of free speech.

But the real outrage here is that he was invited in the first place.

Salam Al-Marayati, longtime president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), was invited by a group called Jews United for Democracy to speak as part of its panel on “After Four Years of Division, Tension and Bigotry—Now What?”

Yet Al-Marayati himself is a promoter of division, tension and bigotry. Bigotry against Jews, that is.

Al-Marayati’s organization, MPAC, publicly defended infamous French Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy, after Garaudy was fined by the French government for his denial activities.

Al-Marayati was a longtime member of the small editorial board of The Minaret, a magazine closely associated with MPAC leaders, which in the 1990s and early 2000s repeatedly published grotesque political cartoons depicting Jews and Israel controlling the American government. That theme was consistent with Al-Marayati’s assertion that the U.S. “is in full partnership with Israel. Where Israel goes, our government follows.”

Al-Marayati has had a long association with the white supremacist William Baker, the onetime chairman of the extremist Populist Party, which was founded by a late neo-Nazi leader / Holocaust denier named Willis Carto, in 1984. MPAC has invited Baker to speak at a number of events. At MPAC’s “United for Al Quds Conference” in 2002, Al-Marayati himself introduced and praised Baker.

Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is standard fare for Al-Marayati. For example, writing in the notoriously anti-Israel magazine Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in June 1994, Marayati asserted: “Just as Hitler forged a conflict between Judaism and Christianity, apologists for Israel crave for Islam to be at odds with both Judaism and Christianity.”

Let it be noted that the U.S. government, together with the 30 other member-states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, uses a definition of antisemitism which states unequivocally that “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is anti-Semitic.

Al-Marayati’s ugly record of Israel-bashing also includes his declaration, immediately after the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks, that ”If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.”

At the same time, Al-Marayati has a long record of justifying or condoning Islamic terrorism. He has equated America’s struggle for independence from Britain with Islamic fundamentalism. He denounced then-Senator Joe Biden’s Counterterrorism Act of 1995. He accused the U.S. of committing “a terrible act of terrorism” by sanctioning Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He condemned the U.S. for striking at terrorists in Sudan and Afghanistan.

Here’s what Al-Marayati’s MPAC had to say following the March 1997 suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that left three dead and 48 wounded: “Because the Palestinian people have no avenues to redress their grievances, some of them have been pushed beyond the margins of society and have adopted violent reactions to express their despair and suffering.”

Al-Marayati’s occasional statements condemning terrorism are meaningless, because he defines Israel’s actions as terrorism and Palestinian Arab violence as freedom-fighting. Here’s how MPAC has put it: “Terrorism is wrong: Israeli occupation is terrorism and oppression. American policy must be based on the recognition that no people will remain passive under foreign occupation and military aggression. The Palestinian people are no different…The uprising is a spontaneous, collective reaction to the continued illegal and immoral Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people and their land.”

Likewise, regarding Hezbollah, Al-Marayati has said: “If the Lebanese people are resisting Israeli intransigence on Lebanese soil, then that is the right of resistance and they have the right to target Israeli soldiers in this conflict. That is not terrorism. That is a legitimate resistance. That could be called liberation movement, that could be called anything, but it’s not terrorism.”

That’s why then-Congressman Richard Gephardt (D-Missouri) withdrew the nomination of Al-Marayati to serve on the National Commission on Terrorism in 1999. Al-Marayati’s record of apologizing for terrorism is lengthy, indisputable, and nothing less than damning.

In recent years, Al-Marayati has softened his tone in the hope of trying to re-enter the mainstream. But sometimes he just can’t resist showing his true colors. Last year, he and MPAC signed a public letter defending Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, following her statements accusing Jews of bribing members of Congress to support Israel.

I guess Al-Marayati’s support for Rep. Omar is no coincidence, considering that Omar’s statements sound a lot like what Al-Marayati and his organization have been saying about Jews for the past three decades. Birds of a feather flock together, after all.