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Like the Anti-Ezra Jews Caused the Destruction of the Second Temple…

Anti-Semites in Knitted Kippot

10 MAY 2009

Those who most admire Rav Shlomo Issachar Teichtal’s book, Em Ha Banim Smeicha, least understand its true message.

While the book may be a most eloquent argument in support of the mitzvah of yishuv haaretz, that’s not its most profound lesson.

Of far greater import is the intellectual awakening that overcame this holy Jew in the midst of his terrified crossing through the fires of the Shoah. As the inferno burned about him, the Rabbi made a complete cheshbon, a full and thorough accounting of all the halachic resources he had at hand (and everything a life’s worth of Torah study permitted him to commit to memory) and issued a psak halacha that absolutely reversed his pre-war position regarding aliyah to Israel.

He admitted his mistake, which he candidly explained was born more of prejudice than scholarship, and accepted his role in the death of Europe’s Jewish population. His claim that he and his fellow European Rabbis had “blood on their hands” for not encouraging wholesale immigration to Israel still resounds mightily today.

And this precisely was his genius.

Rav Teichtal, zt”l, hy”d, had the wherewithal, intellectual honesty and courage to assess the reality in which he was living and reassess his learning vis-à-vis that same reality. He was brave enough to ask himself if he had been thorough enough in his original learning of the applicable sources, or, indeed, if he had permitted the reigning political zeitgeist to shape his halachic outlook.

When the final reckoning was made, it was already too late. Those same Jews he had forbidden to ascend to Eretz Yisrael were either already dead or on their way to being killed. And he too suffered their fate.

Yet for all that, his book remains a testament to the steadfastness of his faith and his passion for truth. That he – or anyone else – would undertake a halachic treatise on death’s door, in the midst of history’s greatest ever upheaval, is a Kiddush Hashem on a scale the Jewish People rarely has the privilege to glimpse.

Rav Teichtal’s cry should echo powerfully in the ears of all those Jews of a mamlachti (statist) stripe in Israel today, who fail on a daily basis to take the full measure of the government regime and the reach of its institutional tentacles, and choose instead to support its evil deeds and designs as if it were some kind of religious imperative. They, too, will have blood on their hands should they refuse to make a full accounting of the changing reality about them.

Best pray they do so before the fires begin burning as they once did, and those same mamlachti rabbis become – like Rav Teichtal himself – accomplices to wholesale murder.

Secret Horrific Crimes of the USG in WWII

71st Anniversary: Roosevelt’s Concentration Camps

Written by Gary North on April 1, 2013

On April 1, 1942, California announced the order for the arrest and deportation of Japanese citizens in California. They were sent into internment camps — read: concentration camps in Idaho. Here are photos and an accompanying account. Here are other photos.

We all know this story. President Roosevelt signed an executive order on February 19, 1942, authorizing the program. Congress never voted on this. The program was implemented by Secretary of War Henry Stimpson. The only major figure in Washington to oppose this was J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI.

The prisoners were released in early 1945. They were given $10 and a train ticket back home. But they had no homes to go to. Most of their homes had been sold, along with their possessions and businesses, at bargain basement auctions in 1942.

This executive order stayed on the books until February 19, 1976, when Gerald Ford rescinded it. In 1982, the American government issued a formal apology. It made token reparations to survivors of $20,000 each.

This is the airbrushed version. This part of the story could not be hidden from the public. It got into American history textbooks.

The suppressed version is worse.

THE OTHER CAMPS

The hard-core version is this: the U.S. government had several governments in South America round up Japanese residents, who were then shipped to the U.S. The government put them in concentration camps. These camps received no publicity. One of them was in Crystal City, Texas.

This was kidnapping, pure and simple.

This story is so horrifying that the history textbooks never mention it. You will see no show about it on the History Channel. You can read about it here.

These people were sent to Japan after the war.

In 1945, delegates to the Mexico City Conference on the Problems of War and Peace agreed that “any person whose deportation was necessary for reasons of security of the continent” should be prevented from “further residing in this hemisphere if such residence should be prejudicial to the future security or welfare of the Americas.” In the United States, President Harry Truman issued a Presidential Proclamation in September that authorized the removal from the Western Hemisphere of enemy aliens “who are within the territory of the United States without admission under the immigration laws.”[9] Most of the Japanese Latin Americans, therefore, were forced to leave.

Between November 1945 and June 1946, more than 900 Japanese Peruvians repatriated to Japan.

That’s just part of it. The U.S. government insisted that about 5,000 Germans also be rounded up by Latin American governments and shipped here. Some of them were Jews. Then the government used them to trade for incarcerated Americans in Nazi Germany.

What’s that? You say you don’t recall reading about this in your high school U.S. history textbook? Or your college history textbook? Or in grad school when you earned your Ph.D in American history? Well, neither did I.

Did the beloved Franklin Roosevelt do this? His government did. So, down the memory hole went that story.

I wrote about it in 2001. A few sites did pick it up. The History Channel didn’t.

If it were not for the Internet, no one would remember the story.

I don’t think the government could get away with this again. The Internet would blow the cover off the story. Anyone who argues that things are getting worse for liberty in America does not know the story of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Continue Reading on www.gunssavelife.com

From Tea Party Economist, here.

Brute Facts Don’t Persuade Anyone

An interesting story told by a Soviet émigré:

… By then, I had already met many Americans for whom “anti-Soviet” was almost as much of a pejorative as it had been in the pages of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party. My favorite was a man in the café at the Rutgers Student Center who shrugged off the victims of the gulag camps by pointing out that capitalism kills people too—with cigarettes, for example. When I recovered from shock, I told him that smoking was far more ubiquitous in the Soviet Union, and anti-smoking campaigns far less developed. That momentarily stumped him.

My mother was also at Rutgers at the time as a piano instructor. She once got into a heated argument over lunch with a colleague and friend after he lamented America’s appalling treatment of the old and the sick. She ventured that, from her ex-Soviet vantage point, it didn’t seem that bad. “Are you telling me that it’s just as bad in the Soviet Union?” her colleague retorted, only to be dumbstruck when my mother clarified that, actually, she meant it was much worse. She tried to illustrate her point by telling him about my grandmother’s sojourn in an overcrowded Soviet hospital ward: More than once, when the woman in the next bed rolled over in her sleep, her arm flopped across my grandma’s body. Half-decent care required bribing a nurse, and half-decent food had to be brought from home. My mother’s normally warm and gracious colleague shocked her by replying, “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you.” Her perceptions, he told her, were obviously colored by antipathy toward the Soviet regime. Eventually, he relented enough to allow that perhaps my grandmother did have a very bad experience in a Soviet hospital—but surely projecting it onto all of Soviet medicine was uncalled for.

The thing to do, if interested in swaying another, is to follow up by grounding simple facts in an interpretive framework. I try to do so on this site, as well.

In the above example, had the lady wanted to convince someone of the horror of Soviet life, the effective combination is to give them facts, but also a short book of basic economic theory.

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