Nineteenth-century illustration of Battle of Tours by A. de Neuville.

Precisely 100 years after the death of Islam’s prophet Muhammad in 632, his Arab followers, after having conquered thousands of miles of lands from Arabia to Spain, found themselves in Gaul, modern day France, facing a hitherto little known people, the Christian Franks.

There, around October 10-11, in the year 732, one of history’s most decisive battles took place, demarcating the extent of Islam’s western conquests and ensuring the survival of the West.

Prior to this, the Islamic conquerors had for one century been subjugating all peoples and territories standing in their western march—including Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. In 711, the Muslims made their fateful crossing of the straits of Gibraltar, landing on European soil. Upon disembarkation, the leader of the Muslims, Tariq bin Zayid, ordered the Islamic fleet burned, explaining that “We have not come here to return. Either we conquer and establish ourselves here, or we perish.”

This famous Tariq anecdote—often reminisced by modern day jihadis—highlights the jihadi nature of the Umayyad caliphate (661-750), the superpower of its day. Indeed, as most historians have acknowledged, the Umayyad caliphate was the “Jihadi-State” par excellence. Its very existence was coterminous with its conquests.  Its legitimacy as “viceroy” of Allah was based on subjugating lands in the name of Allah.

Once on European ground, the depredations continued unabated. Writes one Arab chronicler regarding the Muslim northern advance past the Pyrenees: “Full of wrath and pride” the Muslims “went through all places like a desolating storm. Prosperity made those warriors insatiable… everything gave way to their scimitars, the robbers of lives.” Even far off English anchorite, the contemporary, the venerable, Bede, wrote, “A plague of Saracens wrought wretched devastation and slaughter upon Gaul.”

Strange anecdotes also find their way in the chroniclers’ accounts during this time. Muslim historian Abd al-Hakem reports that, after landing on an island off Iberia, one of Tariq’s squadrons discovered that the only inhabitants were vinedressers. “They made them prisoners. After that, they took one of the vinedressers, slaughtered him, cut him into pieces, and boiled him, while the rest of the companions looked on.”  This incident resulted in a rumor that Muslims feast on human flesh.  (Nearly 1300 years later, in the year 2013, a Muslim jihadi ate the organs of his slain enemyto surrounding cries of “Allahu Akbar”.)

At any rate, this must have been the picture the men to the north had of the invaders from the south—wild and insatiable madmen, possibly cannibals, mounted on swift steeds, not unlike, in this manner, the Huns of old, who, under the “anti-Christ” figure of Attila, came ravaging through Europe, only to be defeated, in part by the Franks, in the year 451 at the Battle of Chalons, also in modern day France, 150 miles east of Tours.

“Alas,” exclaimed the Franks, “what a misfortune! What an indignity! We have long heard of the name and conquests of the Arabs; we were apprehensive of their attack from the East [see Siege of Byzantium, 717-718]: they have now conquered Spain, and invade our country on the side of the West.”

Conversely, the Muslims, flushed with a century’s worth of victories, seem to have had an ambivalent view, at best, regarding Frankish mettle. When asked about the Franks, some years before the Battle of Tours, the then emir of Spain, Musa, replied: “They are a folk right numerous, and full of might: brave and impetuous in the attack, but cowardly and craven in the event of defeat. Never has a company from my army been beaten.”

If this view betrayed overconfidence, Musa’s successor, Abd al-Rahman (“Slave to the Merciful”) exhibited even greater haughtiness regarding those whom he was about to give battle. At the head of some 80,000 Muslims, primarily mounted moors, Rahman’s destructive north
ward march into the heart of France was greatly motivated by rumors of more riches for the taking, particularly at the Basilica of St. Martin of Tours. Rahman initially separated his army into several divisions to better ensure the plunder of Gaul. Writes Isidore, author of the Chronicle of 754: “[Rahman] destroyed palaces, burned churches, and imagined he could pillage the basilica of St. Martin of Tours. It is then that he found himself face to face with the lord of Austrasia, Charles, a mighty warrior from his youth, and trained in all the occasions of arms.”

Indeed, unbeknownst to the Muslims, the battle-hardened Frankish ruler Charles, aware of their purport, had begun rallying his liegemen to his standard in an effort to ward off the Islamic drive. Having risen to power in France in 717—the same year a mammoth Muslim army was laying siege to Byzantium—Charles appreciated the significance of the Islamic threat. Accordingly, he intercepted the invaders somewhere between Poitiers and Tours, the latter being the immediate aim of the Muslims. The chroniclers give amazing numbers concerning the Muslims, as many as 300,000. Suffice to say, the Franks were greatly outnumbered, and most historians are content with the figures of 80,000 Muslims against 30,000 Franks.

The Muslim force consisted mainly of cavalry, and was geared for offensive warfare. The vast majority being of Berber extraction, they wore little armor, though their elitist Arab overlords were at least chain-mailed. For arms, they relied on the sword and lance; arrows were little used.

Conversely, the Franks were primarily an infantry force (except for mounted nobles such as Charles). Relying on deep phalanx-formations and heavy armor—reportedly 70 pounds for each man—the Franks were as immovable as the Muslims were mobile. They also appear to have had a greater variety of weaponry: the shield was ubiquitous, and arms consisted of swords, daggers, javelins, and two kinds of axes, one for wielding and the other for throwing—the francisca. This notorious latter weapon was so symbolic of the Franks that either it was named after them or, quite possibly, they were named after it.

The chroniclers state that the two contending armies faced each other for 6-7 days, neither wanting to make the first move. The Franks made much use of the familiar terrain: they appear to have held the high ground; and the dense European woods served not only to provide better shelter but to impede the anticipated Muslim cavalry charge.

Winter approaching, supplies and foraging areas dwindling, and an Islamic sense of superiority all compelled Rahman to commence battle, which “consisted entirely of wild headlong charges, wasteful of men.”

Writes an anonymous Arab chronicler: “Near the river Owar [Loire], the two great hosts of the two languages and the two creeds [Islam and Christianity] were set in array against each other. The hearts of Abd al-Rahman, his captains and his men were filled with wrath and pride, and they were the first to begin to fight. The Muslim horsemen dashed fierce and frequent forward against the battalions of the Franks, who resisted manfully, and many fell dead on either side, until the going down of the sun.”

According to the Chronicle of 754, much of which was composed from eye-witness accounts, “The men of the north stood as motionless as a wall, they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arab with the sword. The Austrasians [Franks], vast of limb, and iron of hand, hewed on bravely in the thick of the fight; it was they who found and cut down the Saracen’s king [Rahman].”

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson writes: “When the sources speak of ‘a wall,’ ‘a mass of ice,’ and ‘immovable lines’ of infantrymen, we should imagine a literal human rampart, nearly invulnerable, with locked shields in front of armored bodies, weapons extended to catch the underbellies of any Islamic horsemen foolish enough to hit the Franks at a gallop.”

As night fell, the Muslims and Christians disengaged and withdrew to their tents. With the coming of dawn, the Franks discovered that the Muslims, perhaps seized with panic that their emir was dead, had fled south during the night—still looting, burning, and plundering all and sundry as they went. Hanson offers a realistic picture of the aftermath: “Poitiers [or Tours] was, as all cavalry battles, a gory mess, strewn with thousands of wounded or dying horses, abandoned plunder, and dead and wounded Arabs. Few of the wounded were taken prisoner—given their previous record of murder and pillage at Poitiers.”

In the coming years, Charles, henceforth known as Martel—the “Hammer,” due to his decisive stroke—would continue waging war on the Muslim remnants north of the Pyrenees till they retreated south. Frankish sovereignty and consolidation were naturally established in Gaul, leading to the creation of the Holy Roman Empire—beginning with Charles’ own grandson, Charlemagne, often described by historians as the “Father of Europe.” As historian Henri Pirenne put it: “Without Islam the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed and Charlemagne, without Mahomet, would be
inconceivable.”

Aside from the fact that this battle ushered in an end to the first massive wave of Islamic conquests, there are some indications that it also precipitated the fall of the Umayyad caliphate, which, as mentioned earlier, owed its very existence to jihad, victory, plunder and slavery (ghanima). In 718, the Umayyads, after investing a considerable amount of manpower and resources trying to conquer Byzantium, the eastern doorway to Europe, lost horribly. Less than fifteen years later, their western attempt was, as seen, also rebuffed at Tours. In the context of these two pivotal defeats, a mere 18 years after Tours, the Umayyad caliphate was overthrown by the Abbasids, and the age of Islam’s great conquests came to an end (until the rise of the Ottoman empire which, like the Umayyads, was also a jihadi state built on territorial conquests, and which did finally conquer Constantinople).

Thus any number of historians, such as Godefroid Kurth, would go on to say that the Battle of Tours “must ever remain one of the great events in the history of the world, as upon its issue depended whether Christian Civilization should continue or Islam prevail throughout Europe.”

Despite the obvious significance of this battle, cynical modern day historians often point to Edward Gibbon and others as embellishing and aggrandizing this battle. In fact, from the very start, the earliest writers contemporaneous to the battle portrayed it as a war between Islam and Christendom. Gibbon further, and famously, argued that, had the Muslims won, “Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.” (Writing in the 18th century, clearly Gibbon was unaware that his predictions would still come true, though not by way of active conquest but passive resignation, as the Koran is now taught in Oxford, accorded the same worth of the Bible—equal literature or equal revelation—and Islamic Sharia law is functioning in Britain.)

Still, some modern armchair historians insist that the Battle of Tours was naught but a “minor skirmish” dedicated to plunder, not conquest. As evidence, they point to the fact that, while early Christian chroniclers highlighted this battle, their Muslim counterparts, (except for the very earliest writers, who did acknowledge it as a disastrous defeat) tended to overlook or minimize its significance—as if that is not to be expected from the defeated, especially their posterity.

Other historians insist that plunder was the only objective of the Muslims—a wholly materialistic thesis to be expected from modern-day historians incapable of transcending their own 21st century epistemology. Thus they anachronize, particularly since the texts make clear that conquest and consolidation were always on the mind of the invading Muslims, Rahman’s army no exception: Reinaud tells us that in the emir’s head lurked the possibility of “uniting Italy, Germany, and the empire of the Greeks to the already vast domains of the champions of the Koran.”

In fact, when placed in context, the Muslims’ lust for booty only further validates the expansionist jihad thesis (see Majid Khadurri’s Law of War and Peace in Islam which contains an entire chapter on spoils, ghanima, and their central role in the jihad). From the start, the jihadi was guaranteed one of two rewards for his war-efforts: martyrdom if he dies, plunder if he lives. The one an eternal, the other temporal, reward—a win-win situation that, at least according to early Christian and Muslim chroniclers, played a major role in the success of the Muslim conquests. In other words, that the sources indicate the Muslims were booty-hungry, does not in the least negate the fact that, as with all of the initial Muslim conquests, starting with Prophet Muhammad at the Battle of Badr, territorial conquests and the acquisition of booty went hand-in-hand and were the natural culmination of the jihad.

As for general destruction, Michael Bonner author of Jihad in Islamic History, writes, “The raids are a constant element [of the jihad], always considered praiseworthy and even necessary. This is a feature of pre-modern Islamic states that we cannot ignore. In addition to conquest, we have depredation; in addition to political projects and state-building, we have destruction and waste.”

At any rate, the facts speak for themselves: after the Battle of Tours, no other massive Muslim invasion would be attempted north of the Pyrenees—until very recently and through very different means.

But that is another story.

Source

Der Max-Planck-Ökonom und wissenschaftliche Chefberater des Bundesfinanzministeriums, Kai A. Konrad, fürchtet, dass sich das Gefälle in der wirtschaftlichen Dynamik innerhalb Europas erheblich verstärkt. Im Krisenfall solle Deutschland aussteigen. Die Furcht vor einer Katastrophe für die deutsche Wirtschaft hält Konrad für übertrieben. Im Gegenteil, hiesige Unternehmen könnten gestärkt daraus hervorgehen.

Die Welt: Herr Konrad, die Bundesregierung hat alle wichtigen Entscheidungen zur Euro-Krise auf die Zeit nach den Bundestagswahlen verschoben. Werden die Wähler gerade hinters Licht geführt?

Kai A. Konrad: Ich glaube eher an ein Weiter-so nach der Wahl. Die Politik versucht seit Ausbruch der Schuldenkrise Einschnitte aufzuschieben und alle Probleme einfach in die Zukunft zu verlagern.

Die Welt: Angesichts des hohen Schuldenstandes halten fast alle Ökonomen einen Schuldenschnitt für unausweichlich.

Konrad: Die Griechen haben eigentlich genug Vermögen, um selber für ihre Schulden geradezustehen. Aber an das Vermögen kann oder will man nicht heran. Ein erneuter Schuldenschnitt ist deshalb sicher eine Option.

Die Welt: Anfang 2014 wird Griechenland nach Einschätzung der Bundesbank ein drittes Hilfspaket benötigen. Wird das Land damit endgültig zu einem Fass ohne Boden?

Konrad: Das ist Griechenland bereits, weil niemand je einen Boden eingezogen hat. Die Schuldenquote steigt, auch weil die Wirtschaftsleistung dahinschmilzt. Und trotzdem macht die Troika aus EU, Europäischer Zentralbank und Internationalem Währungsfonds die immer gleichen realitätsfernen Wachstumsprognosen für das Land.

Die Welt: Sollte Griechenland zumindest temporär aus dem Euro aussteigen?

Konrad: Nein. Die dann wegen der Währungsabwertung höheren Auslandsverbindlichkeiten würden das Land erdrücken. Wenn man die Währungsunion aufbrechen will, sollte man dies an der Nordgrenze tun. Wenn, dann muss Deutschland aus dem Euro raus.

Die Welt: Deutschland soll zum dritten Mal Europa in die Luft sprengen? Das wird keine Bundesregierung je tun.

Konrad: Der Euro ist nicht Europa. Europa sollten wir retten, nicht den Euro! Deutschland kann zwar aus politischen Gründen aus dem Euro nicht selbst aussteigen. Die anderen Länder könnten Deutschland aber dazu drängen. Dazu kann es kommen. Die wirtschaftlichen Zustände werden in einigen Ländern unerträglich. Dazu treten politische Unruhen. Und wenn Deutschland und ein paar andere starke Länder die Währungsunion verlassen, wird der Euro abwerten und die südeuropäischen Länder kämen wirtschaftlich wieder auf die Beine.

Die Welt: Der Preis dafür ist der Ruin der deutschen Exportwirtschaft.

Konrad: Sie könnte sogar gestärkt daraus hervorgehen. Sie hat die regelmäßigen Auf
wertungen der D-Mark in früheren Jahrzehnten immer wieder gemeistert und wurde so fit für den Wettbewerb. Heute hat sie es da besser. Aber die Fähigkeit, auf Herausforderungen zu reagieren, geht dabei verloren. Und das ist gefährlich.

Die Welt: Trotzdem müsste die deutsche Notenbank die Notenpresse anwerfen, um dem Aufwertungsdruck der D-Mark entgegenzuwirken.

Konrad: Ja, die Bundesbank müsste große Summen in Fremdwährungen aufkaufen, um die D-Mark-Aufwertung in Grenzen zu halten.

Die Welt: Womit Deutschland in eine große Abhängigkeit geraten könnte – wie China heute, das auf riesigen Dollar-Reserven hockt.

Konrad: Die Chancen überwiegen. Die Geldschöpfungsgewinne wären gewaltig. Die Währungsreserven könnte man unkonventionell investieren. Zum Beispiel wie ein staatlicher Investitionsfonds Unternehmen, Rohstofflager und Immobilien im Ausland kaufen. Außerdem: Die Kaufkraft der deutschen Bevölkerung würde steigen, Reisen, Benzin und viele andere Güter würden billiger.

Die Welt: Fürchten Sie keinen Währungskrieg, wenn Deutschland mit der Notenpresse auf Beutezug geht?

Konrad: Nein, im Gegenteil. Deutschland würde ja nur eine Aufwertung zulassen, die richtig wäre und die innerhalb des Euro nicht möglich ist.

Die Welt: Zurück in die Gegenwart: Neben Griechenland werden wohl auch Portugal und Zypern, vielleicht auch Irland bald weitere Rettungspakete benötigen. Kann Deutschland die drohenden Belastungen schultern?

Konrad: Das Ausland stilisiert Deutschland zum zögerlichen Hegemon. Das ist eine Fehleinschätzung. In der jüngst veröffentlichten Vermögensstatistik in Europa hat Deutschland weit unterdurchschnittlich abgeschnitten. Die Politik und die Medien haben diese Ergebnisse heruntergespielt. Wir müssen aber akzeptieren: Deutschland ist klein im Verhältnis zur EU. Und Deutschland ist relativ zu seinen Nachbarn in den vergangenen 15 Jahren deutlich ärmer geworden.

Die Welt: Also kann Deutschland die Belastungen nicht schultern?

Konrad: Deutschland kann die Euro-Zone nicht retten. Wer das glaubt, verweigert sich der Realität. Die EZB kann den augenblicklichen Zustand erhalten, und zwar mit weit geöffnetem Geldhahn und indem sie sich in die Fiskalpolitik einmischt. Aber was steht am Ende? Das Gefälle in der wirtschaftlichen Dynamik innerhalb Europas dürfte sich erheblich verstärken.

Die Welt: Was würde das konkret bedeuten?

Konrad: Deutschland wird in den nächsten Jahren weiter von der Krise profitieren und einen Zuzug von Fachkräften erleben. So entstehen auf der einen Seite leistungsfähige Zentren in Europa und auf der anderen Seite ganze Gebiete voller Rentner und Transferempfänger. Europa gerät so in eine Mezzogiorno-Situation. Was das bedeutet, kann man seit Jahrzehnten in Italien beobachten. Dort muss der reiche Norden den armen Süden mit großen Sozialtransfers unterstützen. Gern tut man das nicht einmal innerhalb Italiens. Angesichts dieser Spannungen droht dem Euro das Aus.

Die Welt: Wann wird es so weit sein?

Konrad: Ein paar Jahre haben wir wohl noch. Ich habe 2010 zu Beginn der Krise gedacht, jetzt ist es schnell vorbei. Aber der Euro hat bis heute überlebt. So ein Prozess kann sich offenbar ganz schön strecken.

Die Welt: Die Notenbank hat mit ihrer Ankündigung, zur Rettung des Euro notfalls unbegrenzt Staatsanleihen aufzukaufen, für Ruhe an den Finanzmärkten gesorgt. Im Herbst entscheidet nun das Bundesverfassungsgericht, ob es dem Aufkaufprogramm der EZB Grenzen setzt. Was passiert, wenn das Gericht das tut?

Konrad: Erst einmal nichts. Das deutsche Verfassungsgericht kann der EZB nichts vorschreiben – das OMT-Programm bliebe voll intakt. Vielleicht könnte das Gericht der Bundesbank den Kauf von Staatsschuldtiteln verbieten. Dann kann aber die französische Notenbank einspringen und mehr Staatsanleihen kaufen. Deutschland würde dafür trotzdem entsprechend seiner EZB-Anteile genauso mit gut 27 Prozent haften müssen. Allerdings nur, solange der Währungsraum hält.

Die Welt: Was würde bei einem Zusammenbruch passieren?

Konrad: Dann steht jede Notenbank für das ein, was in ihren eigenen Büchern steht. Die von der EZB verordneten Staatsschuldtitelkäufe der Bundesbank wirken daher wie ein politisches Pfand: Hat die Bundesbank viele Schuldtitel gekauft, wird ein Auseinanderbrechen der Euro-Zone für Deutschland teurer. Entsprechend kann man Deutschland einfacher zu möglichen Hilfsprogrammen überreden. Sollte das Gericht der Bundesbank den Kauf von Staatsschuldtiteln untersagen, zahlt sich das im Fall des Euro-Zusammenbruchs aus, und es verringert auch den Druck, der auf Deutschland ausgeübt werden kann.

Die Welt: Ist eine Währungsunion ohne politische Union überhaupt funktionsfähig? Oder würde der Versuch, einen europäischen Superstaat zu errichten, zum Ende Europas führen?

Konrad: Eine Währungsunion ohne politische Union kann funktionieren, aber nur wenn Länder mit überschuldeten Staatshaushalten wirklich in die Umschuldung müssen und wenn die Länder eine viel striktere Haushaltsdisziplin einhalten als Staaten ohne Währungsunion. Ich denke da an Staatsschuldenquoten in der Gegend von zehn Prozent der Wirtschaftskraft. Die politische Wirklichkeit sieht ja bekanntlich anders aus. Die andere Alternative ist eine echte politische Union in einem sehr starken und demokratisch legitimierten Zentralstaat in Europa. Aber das ist eine Wunschvorstellung, die mit den politischen Realitäten in Europa nichts zu tun hat.

Quelle: Welt vom 17.08.13

Kai A. Konrad, 52, ist einer der führenden Finanzwissenschaftler Deutschlands. Er ist Direktor am Max-Planck-Institut für Steuerrecht und Öffentliche Finanzen München und Chef des Wissenschaftlichen Beirats beim Finanzministerium. Konrad promovierte 1990 an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Er forschte an der Freien Universität Berlin, der Universität Bergen und der University of California in Irvine. Sein jüngstes Buch veröffentlichte er 2012 zusammen mit “Welt”-Redakteur Holger Zschäpitz: “Schulden ohne Sühne? Was Europas Krise uns Bürger kostet” (dtv, 284 Seiten)

Henryk M. Broder, 44, lebt als Autor in Jerusalem und veröffentlichte zuletzt bei Klaus Bittermann mit anderen die Anthologie “Liebesgrüße aus Bagdad”.

Die Neuköllner SPD will mit der “%%Grünauer Erklärung%%” vom 3. September 2012 als Ergebnis ihrer Klausurtagung ihren Beitrag zur aktuellen gesellschaftlichen Debatte formulieren. Wir betrachten mit Sorge die Entwicklung radikal islamischer Strömungen in Deutschland, vor allem aber auch im Bezirk Neukölln, und erachten es als zwingend notwendig, dass bundesweit konsequent gegen jegliche Form von islamistischen Bewegungen vorgegangen wird:

#Bekenntnis zur Glaubensfreiheit als Privatsache
An dem Grundsatz, dass der Glaube eines Menschen Privatsache ist, müssen wir eisern festhalten. Nur dieser Grundsatz ist einer freiheitlich-demokratischen Ordnung angemessen. Das Recht von Eltern, die Religion ihrer Kinder zu bestimmen, erlischt mit dem vollendeten 14. Lebensjahr. Der Ethik-Unterricht muss Jugendlichen vermitteln, dass sie sich anders entscheiden dürfen. Die Schule muss ein religiös neutraler Raum bleiben. Wir bekennen uns ausdrücklich zum Berliner Neutralitätsgesetz, das dem Personal des Öffentlichen Dienstes verbietet, auffällige weltanschauliche Symbole zu tragen.

#Religiöse Abstriche an der Schulpflicht begrenzen
Es ist eine gute, lebensnahe Lösung, dass Berliner Schulkinder sich aus Anlass des Zucker- und Opferfestes vom Unterricht befreien lassen können. Weitere Abstriche an der Schulpflicht lehnen wir ab. Insbesondere die Teilnahme am Sport-, Schwimm und Biologieunterricht darf nicht aus religiösen Gründen verweigert werden. Wo es nötig ist, kann durch schulinterne Lösungen (z.B. Teilungsunterricht) religiösen Befindlichkeiten Rechnung getragen werden.

#Gewaltbereite Salafisten bekämpfen
Ihre Grenze wird die Toleranz des freiheitlich-demokratischen Staates dort haben, wo Religionsausübung zur Gefahr für die Freiheit selbst wird, die er garantiert. Deshalb müssen gewaltbereite Gruppierungen innerhalb der salafistischen Strömungen wie bisher mit den Mitteln des Verfassungschutzes beobachtet und, wenn nötig, durch Verbote, polizeiliche Präventions- und staatsanwaltliche Verfolgungsmaßnahmen
bekämpft werden.

Zur Förderung der %%religiösen Integration%% fordert die Neuköllner SPD zudem folgende religionspolitische Maßnahmen:
*Die Kultusministerkonferenz wird aufgefordert, sich auf bundesweit einheitliche Regelungen zur Anerkennung von zwei muslimischen Feiertagen zu einigen, an denen muslimische Kinder von der Teilnahme am Unterricht befreit werden.
*Die Ausbildung von Imamen und Religionslehrern an deutschen Universitäten muss ausgebaut werden. Ergänzend zu Tübingen, Münster und Osnabrück müssen auch an einer Berliner Universität Studiengänge für die Ausbildung von Imamen und Lehrerinnen und Lehrern eingerichtet werden.
*Bund und Länder müssen Kriterien entwickeln, unter welchen Voraussetzungen islamische Glaubensgemeinschaften als Körperschaften Öffentlichen Rechts anerkannt werden können. Das geistliche Personal muss über einen theologischen Abschluss einer deutschen Universität verfügen und sich zum Grundgesetz und der freiheitlich-demokratischen Grundordnung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland bekennen.
*Im Land Berlin muss der Grundsatz durchgesetzt werden, dass nur Lehrerinnen und Lehrer mit einem Abschluss in Islamischer Religionslehre von einer deutschen Universität islamischen Religionsunterricht erteilen dürfen.

 Dieser Beitrag wurde am 6. September 2012 veröffentlicht in  Quelle

American Exceptionalism 
A Double Edged Sword 
By Seymour Martin Lipset

Chapter One: Ideology, Politics, and Deviance

Born out of revolution, the United States is a country organized around an ideology which includes a set of dogmas about the nature of a good society. Americanism, as different people have pointed out, is an “ism” or ideology in the same way that communism or fascism or liberalism are isms. As G. K. Chesterton put it: “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence. . . .” As noted in the Introduction, the nation’s ideology can be described in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissezfaire. The revolutionary ideology which became the American Creed is liberalism in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century meanings, as distinct from conservative Toryism, statist communitarianism, mercantilism, and noblesse oblige dominant in monarchical, state-church-formed cultures.

Other countries’ senses of themselves are derived from a common history. Winston Churchill once gave vivid evidence to the difference between a national identity rooted in history and one defined by ideology in objecting to a proposal in 1940 to outlaw the anti-war Communist Party. In a speech in the House of Commons, Churchill said that as far as he knew, the Communist Party was composed of Englishmen and he did not fear an Englishman. In Europe, nationality is related to community, and thus one cannot become un-English or un-Swedish. Being an American, however, is an ideological commitment. It is not a matter of birth. Those who reject American values are un-American.

The American Revolution sharply weakened the noblesse oblige, hierarchically rooted, organic community values which had been linked to Tory sentiments, and enormously strengthened the individualistic, egalitarian, and anti-statist ones which had been present in the settler and religious background of the colonies. These values were evident in the twentieth-century fact that, as H. G. Wells pointed out close to ninety years ago, the United States not only has lacked a viable socialist party, but also has never developed a British or European-type Conservative or Tory party. Rather, America has been dominated by pure bourgeois, middle-class individualistic values. As Wells put it: “Essentially America is a middle-class [which has] become a community and so its essential problems are the problems of a modern individualistic society, stark and clear.” He enunciated a theory of America as a liberal society, in the classic anti-statist meaning of the term:

It is not difficult to show for example, that the two great political parties in America represent only one English party, the middle-class Liberal party. . . . There are no Tories . . . and no Labor Party. . . . [T]he new world [was left] to the Whigs and Nonconformists and to those less constructive, less logical, more popular and liberating thinkers who became Radicals in England, and Jeffersonians and then Democrats in America. All Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one sort or another. . . . The liberalism of the eighteenth century was essentially the rebellion . . . against the monarchical and aristocratic state–against hereditary privilege, against restrictions on bargains. Its spirit was essentially anarchistic–the antithesis of Socialism. It was anti-State.

COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

In dealing with national characteristics it is important to recognize that comparative evaluations are never absolutes, that they always are made in terms of more or less. The statement that the United States is an egalitarian society obviously does not imply that all Americans are equal in any way that can be defined. This proposition usually means (regardless of which aspect is under consideration–social relations, status, mobility, etc.) that the United States is more egalitarian than Europe.

Comparative judgments affect all generalizations about societies. This is such an obvious, commonsensical truism that it seems almost foolish to enunciate it. I only do so because statements about America or other countries are frequently challenged on the ground that they are not absolutely true. Generalizations may invert when the unit of comparison changes. For example, Canada looks different when compared to the United States than when contrasted with Britain. Figuratively, on a scale of 0 to 100, with the United States close to 0 on a given trait and Britain at 100, Canada would fall around 30. Thus, when Canada is evaluated by reference to the United States, it appears as more elitist, law-abiding, and statist, but when considering the variations between Canada and Britain, Canada looks more anti-statist, violent, and egalitarian.

The notion of “American exceptionalism” became widely applied in the context of efforts to account for the weakness of working-class radicalism in the United Stat
es. The major question subsumed in the concept became why the United States is the only industrialized country which does not have a significant socialist movement or Labor party. That riddle has bedeviled socialist theorists since the late nineteenth century. Friedrich Engels tried to answer it in the last decade of his life. The German socialist and sociologist Werner Sombart dealt with it in a major book published in his native language in 1906, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? As we have seen, H. G. Wells, then a Fabian, also addressed the issue that year in The Future in America. Both Lenin and Trotsky were deeply concerned because the logic of Marxism, the proposition expressed by Marx in Das Kapital that “the more developed country shows the less developed the image of their future,” implied to Marxists prior to the Russian Revolution that the United States would be the first socialist country.”

Since some object to an attempt to explain a negative, a vacancy, the query may of course be reversed to ask why has America been the most classically liberal polity in the world from its founding to the present? Although the United States remains the wealthiest large industrialized nation, it devotes less of its income to welfare and the state is less involved in the economy than is true for other developed countries. It not only does not have a viable, class-conscious, radical political movement, but its trade unions, which have long been weaker than those of almost all other industrialized countries, have been steadily declining since the mid-1950s. These issues are covered more extensively in chapter Three. An emphasis on American uniqueness raises the obvious question of the nature of the differences. There is a large literature dating back to at least the eighteenth century which attempts to specify the special character of the United States politically and socially. One of the most interesting, often overlooked, is Edmund Burke’s speech to the House of Commons proposing reconciliation with the colonies, in which he sought to explain to his fellow members what the revolutionary Americans were like. He noted that they were different culturally, that they were not simply transplanted Englishmen. He particularly stressed the unique character of American religion. J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, in his book Letters from an American Farmer, written in the late eighteenth century, explicitly raised the question, “What is an American?” He emphasized that Americans behaved differently in their social relations, were much more egalitarian than other nationalities, that their”dictionary” was “short in words of dignity, and names of honor,” that is, in terms through which the lower strata expressed their subservience to the higher. Tocqueville, who observed egalitarianism in a similar fashion, also stressed individualism, as distinct from the emphasis on “group ties” which marked Europe.

These commentaries have been followed by a myriad–thousands upon thousands–of books and articles by foreign travelers. The overwhelming majority are by educated Europeans. Such writings are fruitful because they are comparative; those who wrote them emphasized cross-national variations in behavior and institutions. Tocqueville’s Democracy, of course, is the best known. As we have seen, he noted that he never wrote anything about the United States without thinking of France. As he put it, in speaking of his need to contrast the same institutions and behavior in both countries, “without comparisons to make, the mind doesn’t know how to proceed.” Harriet Martineau, an English contemporary, also wrote a first-rate comparative book on America. Friedrich Engels and Max Weber were among the contributors to the literature. There is a fairly systematic and similar logic in many of these discussions. Beyond the analysis of variations between the United States and Europe, various other comparisons have been fruitful. In previous writings, I have suggested that one of the best ways to specify and distinguish American traits is by contrast with Canada. There is a considerable comparative North American literature, written almost entirely by Canadians. They have a great advantage over Americans since, while very few of the latter study their northern neighbor, it is impossible to be a literate Canadian without knowing almost as much, if not more, as most Americans about the United States. Almost every Canadian work on a given subject (the city, religion, the family, trade unions, etc.) contains a great deal about the United States. Many Canadians seek to explain their own country by dealing with differences or similarities south of the border. Specifying and analyzing variations among the predominantly English-speaking countries–Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States–is also useful precisely because the differences among them generally are smaller than between each and non-Anglophonic societies. have tried to analyze these variations in The First New Nation. The logic of studying societies which have major aspects in common was also followed by Louis Hartz in treating the overseas settler societies–United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia, and South Africa–as units for comparison. Fruitful comparisons have been made between Latin America and Anglophonic North America, which shed light on each.

Some Latin Americans have argued that there are major common elements in the Americas which show up in comparisons with Europe. Fernando Cardoso, a distinguished sociologist and now president of Brazil, once told me that he and his friends (who were activists in the underground left in the early 1960s) consciously decided not to found a socialist party as the military dictatorship was breaking down. They formed a populist party because, as they read the evidence, class-conscious socialism does not appeal in the Americas. With the exceptions of Chile and Canada (to a limited extent), major New World left parties from Argentina to the United States have been populist. Cardoso suggested that consciousness of social class is less salient throughout most of the Americas than in postfeudal Europe. However, I do not want to take on the issue of how exceptional the Americas are; dealing with the United States is more than enough.

IBERALISM, CONSERVATISM, AND AMERICANISM

The United States is viewed by many as the great conservative society, but it may also be seen as the most classically liberal polity in the developed world. To understand the exceptional nature of American politics, it is necessary to recognize, with H. G. Wells, that conservatism, as defined outside of the United States, is particularly weak in this
country. Conservatism in Europe and Canada, derived from the historic alliance of church and government, is associated with the emergence of the welfare state. The two names most identified with it are Bismarck and Disraeli. Both were leaders of the conservatives (Tories) in their countries. They represented the rural and aristocratic elements, sectors which disdained capitalism, disliked the bourgeoisie, and rejected materialistic values. Their politics reflected the values of noblesse oblige, the obligation of the leaders of society and the economy to protect the less fortunate.

The semantic confusion about liberalism in America arises because both early and latter-day Americans never adopted the term to describe the unique American polity. The reason is simple. The American system of government existed long before the word “liberal” emerged in Napoleonic Spain and was subsequently accepted as referring to a particular party in mid-nineteenth-century England, as distinct from the Tory or Conservative Party. What Europeans have called “liberalism,” Americans refer to as “conservatism”: a deeply anti-statist doctrine emphasizing the virtues of laissez-faire. Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, the two current names most frequently linked with this ideology, define conservatism in America. And as Friedrich Hayek, its most important European exponent noted, it includes the rejection of aristocracy, social class hierarchy, and an established state church. As recently as the April and June 1987 issues of the British magazine Encounter, two leading trans-Atlantic conservative intellectuals, Max Beloff (Lord Beloff) and Irving Kristol, debated the use of titles. Kristol argued that Britain “is soured by a set of very thin, but tenacious, aristocratic pretensions . . . [which] foreclose opportunities and repress a spirit of equality that has yet to find its full expression. . . .” This situation fuels many of the frustrations that make “British life . . . so cheerless, so abounding in ressentiment.” Like Tocqueville, he holds up “social equality” as making”other inequalities tolerable in modern democracy.” Beloff, a Tory, contended that what threatens conservatism in Britain “is not its remaining links with the aristocratic tradition, but its alleged indifference to some of the abuses of capitalism. It is not the Dukes who lose us votes, but the ‘malefactors of great wealth. . . .'” He wondered “why Mr. Kristol believes himself to be a ‘conservative,’ ” since he is “as incapable as most Americans of being a conservative in any profound sense.” Lord Beloff concluded that “Conservatism must have a ‘Tory’ element or it is only the old ‘Manchester School,’ ” i.e., liberal.

Canada’s most distinguished conservative intellectual, George Grant, emphasized in his Lament for a Nation that “Americans who call themselves ‘Conservatives’ have the right to that title only in a particular sense. In fact, they are old-fashioned liberals. . . . Their concentration on freedom from governmental interference has more to do with nineteenth century liberalism than with traditional conservatism, which asserts the right of the community to restrain freedom in the name of the common good.” Grant bemoaned the fact that American conservatism, with its stress on the virtues of competition and links to business ideology, focuses on the rights of individuals and ignores communal rights and obligations. He noted that there has been no place in the American political philosophy “for the organic conservatism that predates the age of progress. Indeed, the United States is the only society on earth that has no traditions from before the age of progress.” The recent efforts, led by Amitai Etzioni, to create a “communitarian” movement are an attempt to transport Toryism to America. British and German Tories have recognized the link and have shown considerable interest in Etzioni’s ideas. Still, it must be recognized that American politics have changed. The 1930s produced a qualitative difference. As Richard Hofstadter wrote, this period brought a “social democratic tinge” to the United States for the first time in its history. The Great Depression produced a strong emphasis on planning, on the welfare state, on the role of the government as a major regulatory actor. An earlier upswing in statist sentiment occurred immediately prior to World War 1, as evidenced by the significant support for the largely Republican Progressive movement led by Robert LaFollette and Theodore Roosevelt and the increasing strength (up to a high of 6% of the national vote in 1912) for the Socialist Party. They failed to change the political system. Grant McConnell explains the failure of the Progressive movement as stemming from “the pervasive and latent ambiguity in the movement” about confronting American anti-statist values. “Power as it exists was antagonistic to democracy, but how was it to be curbed without the erection of superior power?”

Prior to the 1930s, the American trade union movement was also in its majority anti-statist. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was syndicalist, believed in more union, not more state power, and was anti-socialist. Its predominant leader for forty years, Samuel Gompers, once said when asked about his politics, that he guessed he was three quarters of an anarchist. And he was right. Europeans and others who perceived the Gompers-led AFL as a conservative organization because it opposed the socialists were wrong. The AFL was an extremely militant organization, which engaged in violence and had a high strike rate. It was not conservative, but rather a militant anti-statist group. The United States also had a revolutionary trade union movement, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW, like the AFL, was not socialist. It was explicitly anarchist, or rather, anarcho-syndicalist. The revived American radical movement of the 1960s, the so-called New Left, was also not socialist. While not doctrinally anarchist, it was much closer to anarchism and the IWW in its ideology and organizational structure than to the Socialists or Communists.

The New Deal, which owed much to the Progressive movement, was not socialist either. Franklin Roosevelt clearly wanted to maintain a capitalist economy. In running for president in 1932, he criticized Herbert Hoover and the Republicans for deficit financing and expanding the economic role of the government, which they had done in order to deal with the Depression. But his New Deal, also rising out of the need to confront the massive economic downsizing, drastically increased the statist strain in American politics, while furthering public support for trade unions. The new labor movement which arose concomitantly, the Committee for (later Congress of) Industrial Organization (CIO), unlike the American Federation of Labor (AFL), was virtually social democratic in its orientation. In fact, socialists and communists played important roles in the movement. The CIO was much more politically active t
han the older Federation and helped to press the Democrats to the left. The Depression led to a kind of moderate “Europeanization” of American politics, as well as of its labor organizations. Class factors became more important in differentiating party support. The conservatives, increasingly concentrated among the Republicans, remained anti-statist and laissez-faire, but many of them grew willing to accommodate an activist role for the state.

This pattern, however, gradually inverted after World War 11 as a result of long-term prosperity. The United States, like other parts of the developed world, experienced what some have called an economic miracle. The period from 1945 to the 1980s was characterized by considerable growth (mainly before the mid-1970s), an absence of major economic downswings, higher rates of social mobility both on a mass level and into the elites, and a tremendous expansion of higher educational systems–from a few million to 11 or 12 million going to colleges and universities–which fostered that mobility. America did particularly well economically, leading Europe and Japan by a considerable margin in terms of new job creation. A consequence of these developments was a refurbishing of the classical liberal ideology, that is, American conservatism. The class tensions produced by the Depression lessened, reflected in the decline of the labor movement and lower correlations between class position and voting choices. And the members of the small (by comparative standards) American labor movement are today significantly less favorable to government action than European unionists. Fewer than half of American union members are in favor of the government providing a decent standard of living for the unemployed, as compared with 69 percent of West German, 72 percent of British, and 73 percent of Italian unionists.33 Even before Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, the United States had a lower rate of taxation, a less developed welfare state, and many fewer government-owned industries than other industrialized nations.

© 1996 Seymour M. Lipset

source WP

The whole book is online: Click here or here.

STATE DEPT just released this: FRAMEWORK FOR ELIMINATION OF SYRIAN CHEMICAL WEAPONS – click to read

Ira Wechsler (PLP) 8/28/2013

 This has nothing to do with any stated red line and saving face.
It has everything to do with declining US influence and control of the oil
spigot in the Middle East and the billions in profits that are stake for big
oil in the US.

After the invasion of Iraq the
puppet government gave over 70% of oil concessions to Exxon-Mobil. But with the
reshuffle of power in the Shia-dominated Iraqi regime, an increasing number of
contracts are now going to Chinese and Russian oil concerns. In fact the Shia
government is leaning closer and closer to Iran as well. Iraq is the second
largest supplier of oil in the Middle East now pumping close to 3 million
barrels a day and still expanding production. Russian influence in Iran and
Syria has been growing. The Russians only naval base in the Mediterranean is on
that narrow swath of coastline that Syria has along the Mediterranean. China as
the world’s second largest industrial producer is thirsting for direct
contracts with the biggest Middle East oil producers for its expanding
industry. Now it must go mostly through Exxon-Mobil and other western producers
to meet their strategic needs in crude oil.
This is unsatisfactory to a global power. That is why they are developing
nuclear carriers and submarines so they can extend their naval power into the
Persian Gulf region and expand influence in that region.

This
reality has caused a bit of a panic in the ruling circles of US imperialism.
They want to continue their hegemony in the region. That is why as their
economic power is shrinking they must destabilize the Assad regime , topple it,
and kick the Russians out of their naval base on the Mediterranean. Next stop
Iran. There have been numerous initiatives regarding sanctions against Iran.
Not primarily because of their nuclear development, but more importantly their
alliance with Russia. Russia is their largest trading partner. Iran is still
one of the largest oil producers and an even bigger natural gas producer. They
already have a pipeline extending to the natural gas fields in Turkmenistan, a
fact that disturbs US energy companies and the State Dept and Pentagon greatly.
The ultimate projection of US imperialist power would be to overthrow the
clerical regime in Iran and install a friendlier government there. Friendlier
to US oil interests. Israel would love to help the US attack Iran, but the
threat of Russian intervention is a key stumbling block.

So all in all this whole conflict in Syria is a proxy war of the three major
imperialist powers for domination of resources, markets, and labor. War in
Syria could eventually lead to world war on a global scale.

August 2013

 My name is John Loftus. It is
probably kind of silly to have an Irish-Catholic as president of the Holocaust Museum.[1]
A lot of us wonder why we even have a Holocaust Museum
for Jews. Every ethnic group has genocide. What was the largest number of
people killed? During the middle passage of slavery, tens of millions of Africans
died during the slave trade. What ethnic group had the highest percentage of
their people killed? It was not the Jews; it was the Armenians. One out of
every three Armenians in the world died in Turkish deportations in World War I.

 

 How about an Irish Museum?
The population of Ireland
went from eight million to five million. How about a museum for the Native
Americans? More than 700 tribes completely disappeared several centuries ago.
They were just murdered.

 

 The genocide against the Jews was terrible,
but more terrible than I realized. When I first became involved, I discovered
that there was something critically different from all the other genocides. Murder
was just a means to an end. Nobody wanted to kill all the Africans; they were
valuable property. Instead, they wanted to keep them as slaves. Even the Turks
did not want to kill all the Armenians; they just wanted the land back. People did
not want to murder the Native Americans; they just wanted to steal the land. They
wanted the Native Americans out of the way. But for the first time in the
history of man, someone said, “Let’s kill all the children.” The Holocaust was
the first time there was an organized government effort to systematically wipe
out an entire ethnic group. It was a crime so monstrous, it had never been
conceived before. Arguably, the Holocaust was the lowest point in human
history.

 

 I did not know much about the subject at all,
but I had a special interest, because, during the Carter and Reagan
administrations, I was a Nazi War Crimes Prosecutor.[2]
 To be honest, I joined because I thought
it would look good on my résumé, and I might get a free trip to Germany
out of it. But when I became involved, I had a most unusual assignment. They
sent me to work with the intelligence agencies. I received all these top secret
clearances to work with the Central Intelligence Agency and all the other
groups to see if I could find any clues to whether there could be Nazis in America.

 

 I never did get my free trip to Germany; instead, I got lots of free trips to Suitland, Maryland — a
nice little town right outside of Washington,
D.C. That is where the United States
government buries its secrets — literally. There are twenty storage vaults underground.
Each vault is one acre in size. The last scene of the Raiders of the Lost Ark[3]
is what these underground vaults are really like — only not as organized as
they are in the movie. Quite by accident, I got lost and ended up down in the
nuclear warfare document storage vault. In the nuclear vault, I stumbled across
a group of Nazi files that neither I nor anyone else was supposed to see until
the year 2015. I discovered, much to my embarrassment, that many of the Nazis I
had been assigned to prosecute were already on the government payroll as part
of a Cold War spy operation that got all messed up. The British secret service
was supposed to be dumping freedom fighters in America to be trained and sent back
behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, the head of the British operation, a
Communist double agent named Kim Philby, was sending us war criminals instead
of anti-communist freedom

fighters.

 

 I received permission from
the Central Intelligence Agency to blow the whistle. In 1982 I appeared on 60
Minutes in a thirtyminute interview with Mike Wallace. It was the longest
episode he had ever done. When the episode about Nazis in America aired,
it caused a minor national uproar. Congress demanded hearings, Mike Wallace got
an Emmy Award, and my family got death threats. Ever since that 60 Minutes
show, I have become a lawyer who represents people in the United States
and in other governments who want to be whistleblowers. They want to bring up
some of the truth of what happened. When I was in the underground classified
vaults, I foundthat there were secret files on the Holocaust. Now, in the last
couple of years, the British government has started to release some of its files.

 

 During World War II, the Allies broke the Nazi
codes, which were called the “ultra secret.” After breaking the codes, the
Allies were able to read some of the secret intelligence. One of the first codes
they broke was for the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that were
the first attempts of the SS at organized massacres of Jews. Every week the
British secret service would decode these Nazi documents and show them to
Winston Churchill. Churchill was amazed, but would not say anything. In fact,
as early as September 1941 the British government was getting accurate weekly
totals of the number of Jews being killed. Churchill was reading the orders to
kill the Jews sometimes before they were received in the field. The problem was
too much paperwork for the code breakers, so they sent a memo to Churchill that
said, “It is now clear beyond any doubt that the German police are killing
every Jew they can lay their hands on. Therefore, we won’t even bother reporting
on this issue in the future.” That memo was sent in October 1940, just after
the war had started, and the massive killing machinery was underway. British
policy was to say nothing about Jews being killed, because they did not want to
have Jews immigrating to Palestine.
It might have upset the Arabs or interfered with the oil supply.

 

 In 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt found
out about the secret codes, and he wrote the British, asking if they would join
him in a public appeal to Hitler to release the Jews from the concentration
camps. I will never forget the British response, “If we press Hitler too hard,
he might do it.” And where, the British wanted to know, would all the Jews go?
They could not get into Palestine.
President Roosevelt could not get a single Jew into America. Every nation in the world
had closed its gates to the Jews, so Roosevelt
cut a deal with the British. If Roosevelt would agree that the Jews would be
expendable to the war effort, then, in return, the British would agree to a Nuremberg trial to
prosecute the killers afterward. Think about the choices they made. As more and
more of these classified files come out, we are faced with the fact that people
like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill might be accomplices to the
Holocaust, because they kept silent. At worst, they were lying to the American
public and saying there was no proof.

 

 A friend of mine in an intelligence agency
sent me a letter yesterday. He and his dad were assigned to the Vatican during World
War II. President Roosevelt had a special emissary there trying to get the Pope
to argue for the release of Jews. The State Department said we could pretend
the Holocaust was not happening. And they did pretend this killing was not
occurring. The indifference toward the treatment of the Jews went way, way
back, and this indifference was not just against the Jews. One of the first things
that Hitler did when he came to power was to sign a law that provided for the
killing of retarded beings, because he believed they were useless. The retarded
children were moved into sanitariums, and because sterilization was too
expensive, the Nazis simply gassed them. Word of this got out, and all the
churches in Germany,
both Protestant and Catholic, got together and put an end to the program. They
stopped the killing. What a choice that was. They stood up against the Nazis
and successfully stopped that program.

 

 Only a few months later, the people of Germany made
another choice. They turned away and pretended the mistreatment of the Jews was
not happening. The early mistreatment of Jews was a matter of world opinion. In
fact, everybody knew what was going on. In 1939 there was a headline in the Los
Angeles Examiner quoting Hitler as saying that he would kill the Jews if the
West would not accept them. But what were they not saying? It is very clear.
Why didn’t the United States
take the Jews in? We had plenty of room. There are about 5,000,000 Jews in America today,
which is the largest population in the world, even though they are only about three
percent of our population. Most Jews in the world are alive in America,
because we let them in around World War I. We gave them sanctuaries from the
persecutions going on in Russia.

 

 In your grandfathers’ times, when the Great
Depression hit in 1929, people did not want to compete with immigrants for
scarce jobs. As a result, they wanted to close the doors not only to Jewish immigration,
but most immigration for that matter. Congress refused to budge, and the last
bill to admit Jewish refugees died in a Senate Subcommittee in 1939. Even
though the war was going on, we still could have rescued the Jews. There was a
Polish underground, and the Jews asked the Polish people to send their
underground freedom fighters to liberate the concentration camps. The Polish
refused, because they did not want to get involved. Every time the Jewish issue
was raised, it was met with indifference. The Jews are not our people. The
choice was made to do nothing and was repeated over and over again.

 

 President Roosevelt, on the eve of the war,
called for an international conference to try to find a place of sanctuary for
the Jews. The Evian Conference found that there was only one country in the
world, a little Carribean nation, that would take the Jews, but only if a
substantial amount of money was paid. Everybody was willing to close their
eyes. Part of the problem was that it was hard for people to believe that the
most civilized nation in the world, Germany, was running around killing
babies. There was actually a Polish agent who came to Washington and told Supreme Court Justice
Felix Frankfurter what was going on. Justice Frankfurter is Jewish, too.
Justice Frankfurter turned to the agent and said, “I know that you believe you
are telling the truth, but I do not believe it.” It was hard for Americans to
accept. Although the president, the intelligence agencies, and the State
Department knew, the American public, by and large, did not know the full
extent of the violence. There were a few newspapers, like the Boston Globe,
that did a good job of reporting it. But most of the papers, like the New York
Times and even the St. Petersburg Times, buried the report of the Holocaust on
the back pages — if they mentioned it at all. There was a huge weight of
indifference.

 

 My friend Eli Weisel, who was a concentration
camp survivor and won the Nobel Prize, said there were three great evils in
this century — communism, fascism, and indifference — and indifference is the
deadliest of the three. That is easy to say. Think of all the choices that
people made. Even the Vatican
kept silent. All people had to do was to speak out. The Catholic Cardinal of Bulgaria
made the choice to speak out. The SS came to him in Bulgaria and said, “We want you to
round up the 3,000 Jews for deportation.” When the train arrived, out came
3,000 non-Jewish Bulgarians led by the Cardinal. The SS said, “Where are the
Jews?” The Cardinal said, “Jews are Bulgarians. You want Bulgarians, we are
Bulgarians. Take us.” The SS was so embarrassed that they pulled the train out.
There were 42,000 Jews in Bulgaria
at the beginning ofthe war, and there were 46,000 when the war ended. It was
one of the few nations that actively made a choice to help save people.

 

 In studying the Holocaust, we learn about the
choices we make. I had a similar choice when I was in those intelligence vaults
and saw all the records of Nazi recruitment by the Central Intelligence Agency
and other agencies. Quite frankly, I was told to keep quiet about this, not to
mention it. The choice I made was to quit the government, to leave my nice job
as a federal prosecutor, and sit down and write a book about what I had seen. I
saw something down in those vaults that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
When I was in the nuclear vaults, I stumbled across a diary stamped secret. It
was written by a Jewish man named Sol who lived in that borderland between Poland and Russia. Today, we call it Belarus, but in
the days before World War II, the Jewish people called it the Pale of
Settlement. For several hundred years, there was a seventy-five mile wide strip
of land between the borders where Jews were allowed to live. And you could go
from Vilna to Minsk to Baranovitche to Pinsk, all the way down to Romania. Some of these cities and
towns were ninety percent Jewish. The Pale was the most densely populated
Jewish settlement on the face of the earth. Unfortunately for the Jews, they
were right in the middle of Hitler’s invasion path for Russia. When
the German army came through, they did not have enough German soldiers to take
care of the huge Jewish population. Consequently, they asked the local, non-Jewish
citizens to serve as volunteers. People made choices.

 

 One of the volunteers in charge of Sol’s life
was Dr. Stankievich, an educated man and doctor of humanities. It was ironic
for the Jews, because they soon recognized Dr. Stankievich as the inventor of
the sardine method of execution. Dr. Stankievich would have his police force
and local collaborators round up the Jewish people and march them out to a road
where ditches had been dug on either side. At gunpoint, the Jews would be
forced to disrobe, climb in the ditches, and lay on top of each other head to
toe. Stankievich arranged them in this manner so he could shoot through a
double layer of bodies and save ammunition. A layer of dirt over the wounded, a
double layer of bodies, a layer of dirt, and so on. However, the worst thing
about the sardine method of execution was not discovered until after World War
II when American Red Cross doctors conducted autopsies on the graves. They
found no evidence of wounds on the smallest victims. Apparently, to save the
price of a bullet, Dr. Stankievich ordered that the babies be buried alive.

 

 As a reward for his efficiency, the SS
promoted Dr. Stankievich and made him the mayor of Baranovitche, the second
largest city in Belarus.
That is where Sol lived. On the day that Dr. Stankievich arrived, there were
50,000 Jews in the ghetto of the central part of the city where Jews were being
imprisoned. Six months later, there were only 5,000 Jews; the rest had been
killed. Six months after that, only 500 Jews were alive to work as skilled
laborers in Dr. Stankievich’s concentration camp. Sol lost his wife, his 3
kids, and all 110 members of his family. Think about that. Every relative, every
friend, every face he had known on earth had been murdered. This little Jewish
barber did an amazing thing. Sol dug a tunnel under the Nazi concentration camp
and led the last 126 Jews in a breakout. They made it to the swamps, as far as
the fields of Russia,
and joined up with other Jewish fugitives. They did not run away. Instead, they
made a choice. Hundreds of miles behind Nazi lines, this tiny group of young
Jews, some of them in their early twenties, organized into a partisan
resistance brigade, called the Bielski’s Brigade. They took up arms, went back,
and fought against the men who had murdered their families. The young women in
particular were so adept at blowing up railway lines that they crippled
Hitler’s supply trains to the Eastern Front.

 

 Dr. Stankievich put a price of 10,000 marks on
Sol’s head. Six of Belarus’s
SS police battalions were assigned to track down the Jewish Brigade. At the end
of World War II, Bielski’s Brigade was the most highly decorated partisan unit
on the entire Eastern Front. But there were only a few thousand survivors, and
Sol was one of them. Sol remarried a young woman whose life he had saved during
the breakout of the camp, and, by the end of the war, she was pregnant. Sol did
not want to have his child grow up under Communism, so he and his young bride
took up their rifles again, shot their way across the Russian border, and
escaped across central Europe to Italy. They then immigrated to the United States.

 

 When Sol got here, he did not put the past
behind him. He sat down and wrote his memoirs about what had happened to the 50,000
Jews from his little corner of the world who would never be able to speak for
themselves. Proudly, Sol took a copy of his manuscript to the United States
government. Someone, somewhere in our State Department, stamped Sol’s memoirs
secret and then hid them down in the nuclear vaults where I stumbled across
them four decades later. I knew within a little while what they were trying to
hide. One of their anti-Communist freedom fighters, who the British secret
service had recruited, was Dr. Stankievich. They asked our State Department to
hide him and we did. We brought Dr. Stankievich to New York and gave him a job as a broadcaster
at Radio Liberty. You have to remember it was the McCarthy era, and nobody
believed all the charges about war criminals in America. Dr. Stankievich told the
State Department that he could find more freedom fighters. By 1952 the record
showed Dr. Stankievich had relocated almost the entire Nazi government of Byelorussia to the little town of South River, New
Jersey.

 

 I could not believe the intelligence file. I
actually had to go see for myself. I took a security detail, met with a local
informant provided by the New Jersey State Police, and went to visit South River, New
Jersey. It is an amazing place with a private
cemetery for the Belarus SS. In the cemetery, there is a monument to the Nazi’s
president with his picture and title on it. Next to the local church is a
monument to their SS division. To make things worse, all this time Sol had been
living less than a half hour away. What a tragedy. Here is this heroic Jewish
man who fought against the Nazis and Communists and came to America to find
freedom, only to end up living in the shadow of the men who murdered his own kids.
What would you do?

 

 I knew it would be controversial, but I went
to the assistant attorney general of the United States and asked permission
to prosecute a British intelligence agent as a Nazi war criminal. I showed him
the Stankievich file and permission was granted. Secretly, I ordered all the United States
agencies to put a trace out for Sol as a key witness in the future trial of Dr.
Stankievich, but everyone reported back no trace. Sol was missing and, in view
of his age, had been presumed dead. It was terribly sad, but it did not stop my
trial preparations. I had my staff run every Nazi document in the world that
even mentioned Dr. Stankievich. It was an enormous research job, and Dr.
Stankievich was ungrateful enough to die two weeks before we could bring
charges against him. He died peacefully in bed, a citizen of the United States.
There was a big sigh of relief in the British Embassy. The British government
asked the American government to terminate further investigations of similar cases,
because it was much too embarrassing for the British to dig up all their old
Holocaust files. Better to let the Nazi’s die of old age. I was ordered, for
reasons of foreign policy, to stay out of the vaults and forget what I had
seen. But how? How do you forget about someone like Sol?

 

 I told the government that I would not
participate in the cover up, and I resigned from the United States Department
of Justice. I sat down and wrote the manuscript of my first book. I dedicated
the book to Sol, a Jewish man, who bore witness to the Holocaust, and to Meg,
my newborn, so that she may never have to witness such a tragedy. My family has
endured much criticism for the decision I made to keep fighting this battle,
but we received one good thing out of it. After the 60 Minutes show, I received
a telephone call. I was told the government had made a huge mistake. It was
Sol; he was still alive. My wife and I asked the old freedom fighter to keep
his identity a secret, because he was an old man entitled to his privacy. Sol
was still living less than a half hour away from the Nazi compound in South River, New
Jersey. Apart from a few of my fellow prosecutors
back at the Department of Justice, no one in America
knew Sol, but they remembered him in Israel.

 

 Years ago, the Israeli Secret Service tracked
Sol down, and they flew him to Israel
for the dedication of the Yad Vashem, the Israeli Museum
of the Holocaust. Sol brought with him a picture that became part of the
museum’s collection. It is in our museum today, too. The photo, which shows a
couple of rows of young Jewish men and women standing in a forest with crossed
armbands full of ammunition and holding their rifles, is one of the most famous
photographs of the era. The picture is titled, “A Jewish Resistance.” Sol is in
the front row, second from the right. Quite a guy. He lived an exemplary life.

 

 I remember one day I was speaking to a group
of high school students up in New
Jersey of all places, and Sol came along. He was sitting
in the audience. Nobody knew who he was. It was obvious from the questions I was
getting that most of these students were of Eastern European descent, and their
parents, church groups, and civic organizations had told them that the
Holocaust did not happen. They thought that Germans may have killed a few Jews,
but none of their people were involved — no Poles, no Ukrainians, no Russians.
I tried to tell the students that the SS kept meticulous records. The armies in
the Holocaust were not German, they were mostly local volunteers. They were men
who got a kilo of sugar for every Jewish person they shot trying to escape. Sol
told me the only German he ever saw was the commandant in his camp. Everyone else
was one of Stankievich’s local collaborators. I had all these documents, but
the students did not want to see documents. Some of their parents had been
there during World War II. They had not even been born then. They wanted a
witness. Suddenly Sol stood up in the audience and said, “Tell them. Tell them
who I am.” He was willing to sacrifice his anonymity, to risk his life again,
to bear witness to the truth. It was an act of incredible courage.

 

 I told my daughter Meg that there are still
heroes in this world, because her father had met one. Sol made a choice to
testify about the truth, and you have chosen to be here with us today. That is
a very positive choice. Yours is the last generation on earth that will ever
have the opportunity to meet with a Holocaust survivor. You are the hinge
generation. Whichever way you go, that is how history will record it. Teach
your children in the future that all of us, Jews, Gentiles, black, white, and
brown, can never afford to let genocide come back again. It will always come
back unless we work together to stop it. We have to make the right choices; we
cannot be indifferent. I know from your very presence here today that you are
people of courage, conscience, and commitment.

 

 

John J.
Loftus, 2000. President, Florida
Holocaust Museum.
B.A., Boston College,
1971; M.P.A., Suffolk University, 1977; J.D., Suffolk University
Law School,
1977. This speech, including the statistical and factual assertions, is derived
in large part from John Loftus & Mark Aarons, The Secret War against the
Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (St. Martin’s Press
1997).

Mr. Loftus
is an author, lecturer, and attorney. He authored The Belarus Secret (Knopf 1982)
and Valhalla’s Secret (A. Mthly. Press 1990),
and he co-authored Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks
(St. Martin’s Press 1993) and The Secret War against the Jews: How Western
Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (St. Martin’s Press 1995). In addition to
his literary accolades, Mr. Loftus has served as a Nazi War Crimes Prosecutor
and a consultant for 60 Minutes and Prime Time Live, and he currently operates
his own private practice, Loftus Law Offices, as well as Loftus Lectures.

Tonight, I went on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show, and Lawrence O’Donnell yelled at me. Or, rather, he O’Reilly’d at me. That O’Donnell interrupted and harangued and mansplained and was generally an angry grandpa at me is not what I take issue with, however. What bothers me is that, look: your producers take the time to find experts to come on the show, answer your questions, and, hopefully, clarify the issue at hand. 

I was invited on the show to talk about Obama’s (very wise) decision to cancel his Moscow summit with Putin, about which I wrote here. I am an expert on Russia. In fact, it is how you introduced me: “Previously, she was a Moscow-based correspondent for Foreign Policy and The New Yorker.” I’m not going to toot my own horn here, but I was there for three years, I’m a fluent, native speaker of Russian, and, god damn it, I know my shit. 

Which is why I wish you’d let me finish answering your bullshit question, which went like this:

“Julia, to start [the White House statement canceling the summit] with the Snowden factor, for the Russian statement to say, ‘this is a situation which we did not create,’ is of course a lie. They were in complete control of the outcome of what would happen to Snowden from the second he arrived at that airport. But administration, are you surprised that the administration included it in their official statement about the decision?” 

Okay, no I was not surprised about their decision to include it in the official statement because Snowden was the catalyst for this decision, and it was a good decision because Russia and America have not been getting along and have not been getting anything done for a while now. Like, for a good year and a half. 

But I decided to contest O’Donnell’s premise that Russia had this thing planned and under control from the beginning, and that they did, in fact, create the situation. We then squabbled over whether Putin personally controls everything in Russia: what TV anchors say, everything that happens at Sheremetyevo, even every breath that Snowden takes. “Julia, Julia, Julia. You aren’t seriously suggesting that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government did not have complete, total, absolute control over the outcome of Edward Snowden entering that airport in Moscow?” (“That airport in Moscow” is called, say it with me now, SHEH-REH-MEH-T-YE-VO! See, helps to have a Russia expert around!)

Because O’Donnell didn’t let me get a word in edgewise after that, let me explain.

Yes. I am seriously suggesting that. I am also seriously suggesting the following things:

• Vladimir Putin is not omnipotent. He does not control everything that happens in the Russian Federation, a vast and often inhospitable landmass that spans 10 time zones. 
• Similarly, Barack Obama does not have total control over the minutiae of the United States of America.
• Putin does not orchestrate, he reacts. Putin is no chess player. He is a knee-jerk, short-sighted little tyrant. Don’t give him credit where credit isn’t due.
• Americans, especially Americans who have never been to Russia, overestimate the abilities of both Putin and the Russians. Because, I mean, come on. Tank!
• The Russians did not create the Snowden situation; Julian Assange and the U.S. government did. Assange insinuated himself into the situation and sent Snowden to Ecuador (the country granting him asylum) through Russia (his great friend). 
• The Obama administration trapped Snowden in Russia. The U.S. unsealed the charges before it had Snowden in custody, revoked his passport, then downed the plane of the president of a sovereign state over other sovereign states because it thought Snowden was on board. The only place, by design, where Snowden could go was back to the U.S. Where he was charged with espionage, for which the maximum punishent is death.
• Russia is a brutal place where whistleblowers are harassed and killed, but Russia, unlike the U.S., has no death penalty. And it is only because the Russians made a stink about it, that Eric Holder was forced to come out andassure the Russians that Edward Snowden won’t be put to death. This happened over a month after Snowden’s arrival in Moscow, and after the charges of espionage were unsealed.
• If a Russian Edward Snowden ended up in JFK Airport, there is no way in hell we’d turn him over to the Russians. Not in a hundred years, and not ever.
• You can’t back Putin into a corner and leave him no options. If you are a world leader worth your salt, and have a good diplomatic team working for you, you would know that. You would also know that when dealing with thugs like Putin, you know that things like this are better handled quietly. Here’s the thing: Putin responds to shows of strength, but only if he has room to maneuver. You can’t publicly shame him into doing something, it’s not going to get a good response. Just like it would not get a good response out of Obama.
• The Obama administration totally fucked this up. I mean, totally. Soup to nuts. Remember the spy exchange in the summer of 2010? Ten Russian sleeper agents—which is not what Snowden is—were uncovered by the FBI in the U.S. Instead of kicking up a massive, public stink over it, the Kremlin and the White House arranged for their silent transfer to Russia in exchange for four people accused in Russia of spying for the U.S. Two planes landed on the tarmac in Vienna, ten people went one way, four people went the other way, the planes flew off, and that was it. That’s how this should have been done if the U.S. really wanted Snowden back.
• However, the decision to blow off the Moscow summit was a good one. See yesterday’s post.
• I am not a Putin apologist. I think he and his people do bad things, like kill people and fleece the country for its wealth. But neither do I think he’s oppressing the Russian masses. He is their most extreme and natural, their most post-Soviet manifestation.

There.

My main beef with O’Donnell is not that he wouldn’t let me make these 11 points—because, let’s face it, that’s not what th
e TV is for—but that he did exactly the same shit Russians did to me when I was in Russia. They assumed that the U.S. and its government was one sleek, well-functioning monolith, that Obama was omnipotent, and that everyone in the world, including other important (and nuclear!) world leaders, act and must act as Russia demands it should, using Russian foreign policy calculus, and with only Russian interests in mind.

Sound ridiculous? Believe me, it sounds just as insane in reverse. The problem is that this was not in the ranting comments section, but was coming from the host of a prime time, national television show. And if you don’t have the good sense and education or, hell, the reporting experience to know better, then just let the guests you invited on speak.

Otherwise, don’t waste my fucking evening.

For the video follow this link: Source

How Nixon got shot of Munich 

 

By Amir
Oren 

 

Eleven
members of the Israeli delegation to the Munich Olympics were murdered by
people belonging to the Black September organization, or killed in a failed
rescue attempt, on September 5, 1972. One angle of the story remains vague: the
politics and diplomacy in the wake of the terror attack. 

 

Now the
missing information has been supplied, thanks to the declassification last
summer of secret documents from U.S. President Richard Nixon’s administration. Some
verbatim excerpts from these documents provide a rare lesson in personal and
international relations, with the help of an American team then headed by
President Nixon, Secretary of State William Rogers, his rival – and ultimately
successor – National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger’s deputy,
General Alexander Haig. 

 

‘They
have got to hit somebody’

 

September
5, 10:35 P.M. Haig reports to Nixon that all the hostages have been killed. “The
Israelis are going to react,” he says. 

 

Nixon:
“Who are they going to hit though?” 

 

Haig:
“Lebanon, though they will find out where based [sic].” 

 

Nixon:
“They are capable of it. They have got to hit somebody, don’t you
think?” 

 

Ten
minutes later, Nixon says to Haig: “Hell, what do we care about Lebanon. Think
we have to be awfully tough. I want you to run that by a couple of people. Any
nation that harbors or gives sanctuary to these international outlaws – we will
cut off all economic support. Obviously Lebanon. Jordan’s another. Don’t know
who else we have relations with.” 

 

Haig: “We
may have some Chinese problem on this.” 

 

Nixon:
“Screw the Chinese on this one. Be very tough.” 

 

At
10:55, Haig phones Rogers and tells him that Nixon plans to call a meeting at
8:30 A.M. the next day. “He has asked you to come over and sit down and
see where to go on this. He’s threatened to break relations with nations that
harbor or give sanctuary to these guerrillas.” 

 

Rogers:
“He can’t do that, especially when we don’t know which nations. What we
are trying to do tonight, we are trying to get some protection against a JDL
[Jewish Defense League] blowup.” 

 

Haig:
“He always wants to do something. We have to be careful not to do
something he will regret.” 

 

Five
minutes later, Nixon tells Haig over the phone: “I might consider showing
our position on this by flying to the Israelis’ funeral. Tell them that I am
here at the White House getting reports as they come in, and that I am saddened
and shocked by this terrible incident and we will comment in the
morning.” 

 

At
11:25 P.M. Rogers and Haig talk on the telephone. Rogers suggests that Nixon
issue an executive order for a day of mourning in Washington with flags at half-mast. 

 

‘I
talked to Rabin’

 

September
6, 1972. Morning. Nixon and Kissinger, some of the time in conversation with
Rogers and Haig, some of the time with White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman,
Kissinger’s rival in ingratiating himself with Nixon: 

 

Kissinger:
“Now, let me say a word about the Israeli situation, Mr. President,
because I feel very, very strongly about it. I look at it the way we would look
at it if eight Pakistanis killed eight Indians. I think you have been a
statesman … And I don’t think we should throw it away in cheap shots. And
this thing could easily turn now. My great fear is, World War I started because
the Austrians had been frustrated for 15 years, had the archduke assassinated;
the Germans and the whole world was outraged. And they thought that for once
they would have a free shot, and they were going to settle the Serbian problem
once and for all.” 

 

Nixon:
“The Austrians thought so?” 

 

Kissinger:
“I beg your pardon?” 

 

Nixon:
“The Austrians thought so?” 

 

Kissinger:
“The Austrians thought. Now, my worry is that if we say to the Israelis
too much that the …” 

 

Nixon: “I talked to Rabin last night.
He sure hasn’t talked that way.” 

 

Kissinger: “Well I would really like
to talk to Rabin in a formal way today when he comes back.” 

 

Nixon: “The thing that I would
emphasize to Rabin, I hadn’t thought on this, which would be a very good test
for the Israelis – I don’t know whether they are able to do it or not. Mrs.
Meir, and she’s the only one that can do it, should call upon the International
Olympic Committee to go forward with those games.” 

 

Kissinger: “I agree with
you.” 

 

Nixon: “But the other reason is she
can say, ‘Well that’s what my boys would have wanted.’ It will make them look
good rather than … You see, the trouble with the Jews is that they’ve always
played these things in terms of outrage. You’ve got the Jewish Defense League
raising hell and saying we ought to kill every Arab diplomat. What we have to
do is enough here, that we’re showing an interest. It’s my thought that the
best thing here is to let Rogers take the lead in the damn thing – rather than
me … We’ve got to show we care on this one because, you were in this country,
well I guess you weren’t, you don’t really know, Henry, what the Jewish community
will do on this. It’s going to be the goddamnedist thing you’ve ever saw. Did
you see both papers this morning?” 

 

Kissinger: “Yes.” 

 

Nixon: “And you’re absolutely right
that that can stir it all up into something very, very … so we’ve got to show
the greatest understanding and sympathy and the rest so that they don’t get
into the hands of the extremists.” 

 

Kissinger: “Mr. President, Haig and I
have been on the phone half the night with the Israelis, who wanted us to do
the opposite of what you suggested, which is the right thing. They wanted us to
appeal to the International Olympic Committee to cancel it [the
games].” 

 

Nixon: “They’re crazy. But they want
to look good, don’t they? … You see, that’s exactly … the reason Mrs. Meir
should do it. She’s the only one that can. Is that what the terrorists want?
They want to make it appear that they’ve stopped the games. It’s like these
assholes that tried to stop us running the government.” 

 

Kissinger: “I will talk to Rabin
because they don’t trust Rogers, but they do trust me. But I’ll talk to him
quietly.” 

 

Nixon: “What does Rogers think we
should do?” 

 

Kissinger: “Well, Rogers thinks we
should declare a national day of mourning. I’m against even that. It’s not our
day of mourning, Mr. President. It’s easy enough now to do a number of
grandstanding … And also, God I am Jewish. I’ve had 13 members of my family
killed. So I can’t be insensitive to this. But I think you have to think also of
the anti-Semitic woes in this country. If we let our policy be run by the
Jewish community …” 

 

Nixon: “By the radical Jewish
community …” 

 

Kissinger: “By the radical Jewish
community and declare a national …” 

 

Nixon: “You understand what I was
talking to Haig about last night was gestures. Let’s do some things here. But
nothing that would make the Germans too mad and so forth …” 

 

Kissinger: “What I would favor, Mr.
President, is to go to the UN …” 

 

Nixon: “Me?” 

 

Kissinger: “Not you. Not physically.
To have the United States to go to the UN and see whether we can get some
international rules on harboring guerrillas and so forth.” 

 

Nixon: “Now, I’ve called Rabin. I’ve
asked him to call me this morning to get me a report. You know they have the
best intelligence. You know he was so good last night … He says I haven’t got
all the information.” 

 

Kissinger: “I’m really concerned that
it’s easy enough now there’s a lot of emotion for it, but if they take Beirut,
which they could, they’ll do something.” 

 

Nixon: “They mustn’t do that … They
can’t start a war over this. You think they might?” 

 

Kissinger: “I think they might.
They’re in the best position they’ve ever been in. No Russians there. We’ve got
an election campaign. Now I got a promise out of Golda Meir two months ago when
you asked me to that they wouldn’t take military action. But this is an
enormous provocation. And they are emotional. And I don’t want them to think
that they’ve got you in their hip pocket.” 

 

Nixon: “Well let me say, you have no
problems with Rabin. The way he’s talking, he’s very rational.” 

 

Kissinger: “Rabin is the sanest guy.
But they …” 

 

Nixon: “But he has others that are
not.” 

 

Kissinger: “They have their own
election campaign coming up next spring.” 

 

Nixon: “Well, you don’t start a war
over anything like this.” 

 

The Jewish swimmer

 

The continuation of the conversation,
according to a memorandum from Haig: 

 

“The president stated that the United
States should not agree to drop out of the Olympics and that Israel should
remain consistent with the position it announced earlier to see the games
through. 

 

“Secretary Rogers stated that all had
agreed on this stand the day before since it would be a terrible slap at the
Germans to precipitously withdraw. It appeared that the Germans were in deep
difficulty already for their handling of the situation at the NATO air
base. 

 

“Rogers said: ‘Perhaps we should send
some of our athletes such as the U.S. swimmer who is of Jewish descent [Olympic
gold medalist Mark Spitz].’ Dr. Kissinger stated that no resolution would be
likely to pass. The question is how to posture ourselves. The resolution should
talk about rules of conduct of those who sponsor radicals who operate across
international borders. It is probable that the Peoples’ Republic of China would
veto … 

 

“Rogers stated that it would be
impossible to get any kind of action. Kissinger stated that this was true, but
it would serve as a deterrent to Israeli action … Rogers stated that another
advantage of the tragedy was that it will again underline the need for an
overall settlement. 

 

“The president commented that it was
ironic that the German government found itself in the position of protecting
Israeli athletes … The president stated that he did not think the flag at
half-mast was a good idea. Kissinger agreed. Rogers said that we would just do
this in public buildings. The president stated maybe just the White House.” 

 

After Rogers and Haig leave the Oval
Office, the conversation between Nixon and Kissinger continues: 

 

Nixon: “I want to get him [Rogers]
off of the other thing. As you know, he wants to have a long talk with me this
morning, and [unclear] … I don’t want to get into the Russian thing, so let
him do this thing.” 

 

Kissinger: “Oh, no, no
…” 

 

Nixon: “[Unclear] Let him be the lead
horse.” 

 

Kissinger: “Oh, God. The only thing I
want – the Israelis distrust him so much they wouldn’t do a thing without
checking with us anyway … I don’t think he should go to Tel Aviv for the
funeral even if he should engineer an invitation.” 

 

Nixon: “Bill? Oh, shit
no.” 

 

Kissinger: “Yeah, but they might want
him. That might give them some visible American support, and that would embroil
us with the Arabs.” 

 

Nixon: “Listen, let me tell you
something. My view – this incident blows any chance at [a peace agreement].” 

 

Kissinger: “You are 100 percent
right.” 

 

Nixon: “But the point is, let’s let
Bill be out in front. Your idea of going to the UN, he finally got the point
… And it will be great for him and it will be great for us.” Kissinger:
“Above all, it will be good for you, Mr. President … Because if he goes
up to the UN, he will be doing something concrete. Of course, nothing will come
out. Nothing ever comes out. But we could make a lot of statesman-like speeches
about curbing terrorism.” 

 

Nixon instructs Kissinger to get Rabin on
the phone, and says: “Would you tell him that … let me put it this way:
Tell him, ‘Look, Mr. Ambassador, the president wants to get Rogers on the right
side of this issue.’ And second, tell him it will be good to put the goddamn UN
on the spot. We want to put them on the spot on this issue, because we think we
got them by the balls here. For him to urge Rogers to go to the UN. Would you
tell him the president would like for him to do that? … 

 

“Also, tell Rabin that I consider it
very statesmanlike, Mrs. Meir’s statement. Would he please convey that to her.
Particularly with regard to going forward with the games. That I had
independently reached that conclusion, but did not want, of course, to suggest
it. But I think that’s exactly the kind of thing that will make tremendous
points in the world by not trying to knock off the games. That’s what the
athletes would have wanted. Third point is that now that they’re in this good
position, don’t blow it. Tell him, ‘Don’t blow it.’ [Unclear] You’ve got to
remember that the president is their friend. Now we’ve got some world opinion
for them. But don’t … these things can turn very fast.” 

 

Kissinger: “You’re right.” 

 

Nixon: “I don’t want them to go
conquer Beirut. I don’t mind them going in and knocking off a few camps, but
even that’s bad right now.” 

 

Kissinger: “I think …” 

 

Nixon: “They would be very well to be
the injured, play the injured martyr.” 

 

Kissinger: “But if we can get to the
UN within the next 24 hours. Now this statement here will hold us for 24
hours.” 

 

Nixon: “What statement?” 

 

Kissinger: “Well, where we say we’ve
consulted with other governments. Frankly, I wouldn’t consult because if you do
it, they’ll say no. And if we go …” 

 

Nixon: “All right.” (Turns to
Bob Haldeman.) “You see, Bob, of course nobody understands what the
president is trying to do here. I’m trying to get Bill doing something! As I
told you last night on the phone, Bob, rather than farting around whether Henry
sees [British Prime Minister Edward] Heath, or [West German Chancellor Willy]
Brandt, or some other. Now Brandt may pose a problem at this point.” 

 

Haldeman: “The UN thing is an ideal
thing.” 

 

Nixon: “Let’s talk a little about
lowering the flag. What I’m concerned about is that you can be sure as hell
that [New York City Mayor John] Lindsay [a former Nixon rival in the race for
the Republican nomination] is going to lower the flag, Congress is going to
call for lowering the flag … Here’s the point. [Unclear] Why don’t you order
the flag when some Irish nationalists get killed?” 

 

Kissinger: “That’s right. What will
Irishmen say if you didn’t lower it when the school children got killed in
Belfast …” 

 

Nixon: “That’s right. It really hits
the point that the flag ought to be low all the time.” 

 

Haldeman: “You didn’t lower it when
the guys [from the Japanese Red Army, which launched a terror attack on Lod
Airport in May 1972] went in the airport and shot up the people.” 

 

Nixon: “Well, it’s the Olympics. The
Olympics, they’re international and all that business. Suppose, for example,
somebody went in and machine-gunned the UN and killed six Arabs
there.” 

 

Kissinger:
“My instinct is – sure, right now you’ll get a lot of indignation. But
whether more people won’t feel that this is the president of all the people …
” 

 

Nixon:
“Going too far?” 

 

Kissinger:
“But Bob would have a better judgment than I.” 

 

Nixon:
“Yeah. Now the idea of the church thing appeals to me if I do it my way. My
way would be I call upon all Americans to go to church and a moment of silence.
But I think, in my way, I quietly slip out of this damn door …” 

 

Kissinger:
“That doesn’t bother me. ” 

 

Nixon:
“… and pick maybe that little church across the way without … any
notice of it. I just walk round, sit in the church for five minutes and walk
out. Get my point? That’s my moment of silence.” 

 

Kissinger:
“That I think, that has meaning. That has human compassion. You show where
you stand, but you don’t involve the presidency of the United States in an
official act.”

 

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