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What is the real agenda?

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By Jim Thompson
For The Highland County Press


Everyone from the president on down is piling on the 1%ers.

It is not lost on some this group of individuals is disproportionately Jewish. If you call on New York investment bankers in December, as I have, you will find Christmas Trees and Menorahs standing side-by-side in the lobbies – large Menorahs sized to compete with the Christmas Trees.

Picking on New York bankers, and their religious beliefs, has been sport in America for a long time.

Henry Ford waged an all out attack on Jewish New York bankers via his paper, the Dearborn Independent. At its peak in the late 1920s, this paper reached 700,000 readers. Copies of it were a mandatory fixture in every Ford dealer's showroom.

Is it OK to be a Jew? It should be, and it should also be OK, in a secular context, to be a Muslim, Christian or whatever your fancy (despite my protestant proclivity to proselytize in other places). We were born with a free will.

Federal elections were held in Germany on March 5, 1933. The country was in desperate economic shape (sound familiar?).

The Nazis garnered the largest vote, but they were not a majority. However, Hitler, who had been chancellor since being appointed to the office on Jan. 30 of that year, had enough votes that he was able to pass the Enabling Act on March 23, in effect giving him dictatorial powers.

In the next five years, Hitler and his cohorts were able to turn the economy around and put Germany on a sound economic footing.

Yet here is the important point – their war against the Jews and others they deemed inferior was largely quiet and in the background for their first five years in power. It was only when the German economy was well on the road to prosperity that anti-Semitism burst into public display on the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938: Kristallnacht.

This was the night Jewish businesses, synagogues and homes were attacked and destroyed.

Repeating, it took five and a half years to bring this contagion onto the scene with full force. Where do we stand today? Our president seems, at best, to be tipped slightly in favor of the Muslims and slightly against the State of Israel, our long time ally.

His attack on the 1%ers has not dared mention any religion, but it seems to this frequent Wall Street visitor that it would not take much to connect the dots.

However, one does not have to go far to see a pattern.

In 2009, Steve Berman, a former (Jimmy) Carter Center board member stated that 15 board members (including himself) had resigned due to Carter’s new book at the time, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid” which clearly had anti-Semitic undertones.

In Jean Edward Smith’s book, “FDR,” he discusses Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II support of the anti-Semitic Vichy France government and his failure to disrupt the German concentration camps. In fairness, others defend FDR, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who believes FDR to have been an advocate for the Jews from day one of the Third Reich.

Unfortunately, FDR’s actions seem to suggest stopping the death camps were not a priority for him and his support of the Vichy government adds further doubts as to his true leanings.

If we think here we are above showing prejudice or worse to any particular religion or set of beliefs, I suggest you think again.

The United States has a history of prejudice, it just happens to swing erratically from one side to the other, depending on who is in power and who is on the outs. We are not cured of this condition. We must be on guard all the time.

It is difficult to tell if we are headed down a dangerous path at the moment, but we should certainly keep a watchful eye.

While I was writing this column, I visited Terezin, a key Nazi concentration camp in the northern part of the Czech Republic. The scenes and stories there are grim.

This was a show camp — they even brought the International Red Cross to it — to look at a room full of nice lavatories, a wash room, which never to this day has ever had water or sewers connected to it. It was a well-designed lie.

But the truth was much grimmer than the story told to the outside world: 10,500 children under the age of 15 came through this camp. Less than 300 lived to see the end of World War II. The adults fared no better.

We need to be watchful, perhaps almost to the point of paranoia, if we are to make sure these atrocities of one human against another are to ever be stopped.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.

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