Whether Jewish Refugees in the ’30s or Syrians
Today
The U.S. Falls Short of Own Ideals
By Juan Cole
September 08, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
Germany, a country of 80 million, will take in
800,000 refugees this year, many of them Syrians. That is 1
percent of their population. It would be like the USA taking in 3
million refugees in one year.
The US takes
in 70,000 refugees a year. Last year it accepted about 400 Syrian
refugees.
The United States invaded Iraq in 2003, which led
to the creation of roughly 4 million Iraqi refugees out of the then
some 26 million Iraqis, or nearly 1/6th of the population. That
would be like 50 million Americans displaced. The US took in only a
few thousand Iraqi refugees after causing all that trouble. The US
invasion radicalized Iraq’s Sunnis and drove them into the arms of
al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which morphed into Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) at
camp Bucca and then took much of Syria, contributing to making 11
million of 22 million Syrians into displaced persons. 4 million
have been forced abroad, to Jordan, Lebanon & Turkey, and now
thousands are trying to get into Europe.
The US politicians who voted for the Iraq War say
we can’t let in Iraqis or Syrians because they might have been
radicalized.
This grim landscape of racism, religious
prejudice, blaming the victim and racial exclusion from immigration
is deja vu all over again. In the 30s, it was the Jews that the
troglodytes didn’t want.
It turns out that President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt
was not responsible for America’s refusal to take more than a
few thousand Jewish refugees during the 1930s. He wanted to spend
$150 million to distribute millions of Jewish refugees among 10
democratic countries. His failures were imposed on him by a
Congress that wouldn’t act and a foot-dragging State Department. By
1940 it was too late, as Europe became a fortress.
But the US in the 1930s did betray its ideals as a
refuge for people yearning to be free. The episode of the SS St
Louis, a ship full of 900 Jewish refugees that got close enough to
Miami to see its lights before being turned back to Europe,
epitomized this failure. A third of the passengers were later
murdered by the Nazis.
One Jewish refugee the US did take in was Albert
Einstein. How would we not have been better off if we’d had more
like him?
The bad economy of the Great Depression was one
reason for fear of immigrants. Politicians and labor leaders
worried that they would take jobs from workers already in the US.
Racism was rampant. In 1924 Congress passed a basically Nazi
immigration law that limited immigration on the basis of country —
i.e. racial — quotas. The Semitic countries like Syria should,
according to this law, keep their people (I recollect that the
annual quota for Syrian immigrants was 400– even though tens of
thousans of Syro-Lebanese had come from about 1880, including famed
writer Kahlil Gibran. All the Norwegians could come who wanted to.)
There was a Chinese exclusion Act, i.e. zero
Chinese were wanted.
So simple Aryan racism was partially responsible
for the exclusion of the Jews. If the US had thrown open its doors,
the 200,000 Jews who went to Palestine in the 30s would have come
here and there never would have been Arab-Israeli wars or 7 million
Palestinian refugees.
Jews were also seen by some US Neanderthals as
having socialist tendencies and so were kept out as radicals. There
was talk of the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy. (Hatred of Jews was
irrational, so that they were blamed for being bankers [they were
less than 1 percent of bankers] at the same time they were
excoriated for being Marxists). There was also the Society for the
Defense of Christianity, so fundamentalists did their part.
All the same arguments against letting in the Jews
are now being deployed to keep out the Syrians. Not Christian.
Alien ideology. Would take jobs. Nobody is openly saying they
aren’t Aryan but the Trumpists might as well be.
In the clip below IRA /
terrorism supporter Rep Peter King, of Irish descent (i.e.
refugees taken in by Protestant America from famine), warns against
letting more than a handful of Syrians in. He isn’t worse than most
of us, unfortunately. (The Irish discontent was justified, but
terrorism never is; and King is a hypocrite.)
Steve Jobs’s father was an
immigrant from Syria. We need more like him, and we need fewer
children washing up dead on beaches. If we’re going to bomb Syria,
we need to take care of the displaced.
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