Kristallnacht 76 Years Ago Today And So Little Has Changed

Do Not Stand Idly By While Your Neighbor Bleeds~ Vayikra (Levitucus) 19:16 

Kristallnacht also known as Night of Broken Glass was an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany on November 9th-10th 1938. Kristallnacht was the day Hitler's final solution "came out of the closet" It is viewed by many historians as the beginning of the final solution, leading to the genocide of the Holocaust.

In a coordinated attack on Jewish people and their property, 99 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps. 267 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. This was done by the Hitler Youth, Gestapo,and the SS. Kristallnacht also served as a pretext and a means for the wholesale confiscation of firearms from German Jews. Kristallnacht was part of a broader Nazi policy of antisemitism and persecution of the Jews. Kristallnacht was followed by further economic political persecutions and horrible genocide.

Throughout  the world we remember Kristallnach, the night the Nazi's began the Holocaust in earnest. Its amazing how little has changed in seven and a half decades. In Arab countries children textbooks are filled with anti Jewish hatred while others call them "moderates. "Islamic Clerics throughout the world call for the death of Jews.

At my dinner table on Friday night, a holocaust survivor admits that she is trying to persuade her son to take his family out of Europe to America, Canada, Australia, Canada, Australia, Israel...’They say they can’t leave me, but I tell them: “Go, get out. My parents left my grandparents behind in Berlin and brought me to safety in England. Now I want you to leave so that my grandchildren will be safe.”’ There is an unbearable desperation in her plea. But she has a point.

As tens of thousands of demonstrators march through the streets of Europe, the chants are modified but the message remains substantially intact: ‘Hamas, Hamas, Hamas — Jews to the Gas’. Or, more simply: ‘Death to the Jews’. Many European Jews, even well-established, affluent Jews, have been checking the suitcase they keep packed under the bed. They have been here before and many are (albeit reluctantly) reading the writing on the wall.

To some extent I thought I was inured. I grew up in postwar apartheid South Africa where a subtle undercurrent of anti-Semitism was a fact of everyday life. So while I was disturbed by manifestations of mob anti-Semitism, I was also less vulnerable to shock. That’s just how people are. Living in genteel, leafy Hampstead Garden Suburb provides an additional layer of protection from such crass outbursts.

But my sanguine state ends abruptly when I am out walking on Saturday. A hundred yards from my front door, I encounter the slogan, freshly painted in yellow, across the pavement: ‘Kill the Filthy Jews’. I am shocked. And shocked that I am shocked. The message is too close for comfort. The leafy gentility is, after all, an illusion.

Source:The terrible warning of a Holocaust survivor 

Sadly Davis' tale is not unique, mainstream politicians the United States  rail against the "Jewish influence on foreign policy" a meme take from Anti-Semitic texts, TV commentators complain about the number of Jews on the Supreme Court. College campus' have become a safe haven for anti-Semitic professors, and a man who led two Anti-Semitic pogroms in NYC advises the President and gets his own show on MSNBC. Last week the Solicitor General of the United States told the Supreme Court that the Jewish claims on Jerusalem are as valid as the Russian claims on Crimea. Jewish leaders were silent.

Today when Israel is attacked by terror, the rest of the world turns their head away just as they did during Hitler's final solution.

FDR refused to allow Jews to escape to American shores, the British not only refused them entry into England but also closed down their access to the holy land, they could have saved millions but wouldn't. They were only Jews.

Today the President of the United States believes that there are places in the world where Jews should not be allowed to purchase homes. And his administration continues to do anything possible to demonize the Jewish State.

At a Thursday evening event at the Carnegie Council, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, the highest ranking military official in the United States, said that Israel went to "extraordinary lengths" to limit civilian casualties in the recent war in Gaza and that the Pentagon had sent a team to see what lessons could be learned from the operation.

“I actually do think that Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties. In fact, about 3 months ago we sent, we asked [IDF Chief of Staff] Benny [Gantz] if we could send a lessons learned team – one of the things we do better than anybody I think is learn – and we sent a team of senior officers and non-commissioned officers over to work with the IDF to get the lessons from that particular operation in Gaza. To include the measures they took to prevent civilian casualties and what they did with tunneling, because Hamas had become very nearly a subterranean society. And so, that caused the IDF some significant challenges. But they did some extraordinary things to try to limit civilian casualties to include calling out, making it known that they were going to destroy a particular structure. Even developed some techniques, they call it roof knocking, to have something knock on the roof, they would display leaflets to warn citizens and population to move away from where these tunnels.”

The next day, Jen Psaki the spokesperson for the State Department, did what she could to shoot down General Dempsey.

It remains the broad view of the entire administration that they could have done more,” Psaki said during a press briefing Friday when asked about the Dempsey. And they should have taken more feasible precautions to prevent civilian casualties.

AP reporter Matt Lee pointed out that, according to Dempsey, Israel had lived up to the “high standards” to which the Obama administration holds Israel. Still, Psaki said, Israel’s efforts were not enough.

The real truth is that Obama, Kerry and their team of Israel haters simply want to demonize the Jewish State.

The Nazi's got support from the Jews. The Jewish-owned NY Times  ignored the Holocaust while it was happening, just as today they extol a bias against the Jewish State today. The AJC discouraged open talk of the Holocaust while it was happening, fearing that activism would create an anti-Semitic backlash.

Nothing has changed, today the Jew haters work with the ADL to prevent Jews from speaking out against an Anti-Israel President of the United States. Jewish politicians walk blindly behind their party's Anti-Israel President and damn the Jewish people with their silence just to be able to move up the political ladder will not be able to silence us either.

Despite the anti-Israel policies of this administration the Democrats in Congress will continue to keep their heads in the sand. Not one of the supposedly pro-Israel Democrats like local politicians such as Chuck Schumer, Steve Israel, and Jerrold Nadler has the guts to stand up and criticize Obama’s policies toward Israel (and that's no chickensh*t).

We owe it to the people who died during the Holocaust to speak out while they remain silent.

May the memory of what started 76 years ago today be a reminder of what happens when the world is silent. May there always be people to speak out against the silence.

May the memories of the victims of the Shoah always be for a blessing