J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.
United States Atomic Energy Commission. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board, Washington, D.C., April 12, 1954, through May 6, 1954. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954, p. 8.
The reconstruction to which he referred was the rebuilding of Germany after the First World War. Anti-Semitism distracted most of the people from focusing on the terrible policies that guided Germany into WWI and the incompetent government that was operational.
The Nazis and most of the Arabs were allies in WWII. The Jews of Palestine—although they were opposed to many of the British policies regarding Palestine—were active in the Allied cause contributing units to the British Army. Although the Germans were brutal to civilians, murdering millions, they refrained from public pronouncements or exhortations to kill civilians in most cases. The Arabs did not. The Mufti was actually given the rank of General in the Nazi SS and had his own SS unit. In this despicable exhortation he actually uses a concept and wording from the Koran. See {584355}. This quotation is important in that it refutes a common claim by some Palestinians that it was only the Germans who were responsible for the Holocaust and the post war Jewish Refugee problem and that the Palestinians had to bear the price rather than place Israel in Europe. This quotation and the other by the Grand Mufti prove that Palestinians were not only complicit in persecution of Jews but took a leadership and advocacy role.
The Iranian President has said publicly that Iran would wipe Israel off the face of the map. Iranian politicians and the public constantly clamor for death to Israelis and for that matter all Jews. Although not all Iranian politicians agree with the desirability or morality of such a policy, the nation was openly trying to enrich uranium and plutonium which are the key ingredients to atomic weapons. Israel is within missile range of Iran and sees Iran as an existential threat which justifies preemption as they did to stop Syrian and Iraqi nuclear development.
She was a brilliant woman who was well ahead of her time in many respects. But her rigid adherence to socialism and communism distorted her view of a number of things. This was one. Pogroms were occasions where the Czarist Russian Cossacks or other gangs of hooligans were “allowed” and often encouraged to attack Jewish farms, villages and stores. They looted the property, raped and murdered many of the people, and often ethnically cleansed areas. Rosa was thrilled by the Russian Revolution and assumed that something as uncivilized as Pogroms and anti-Semitism would never take place in the coming communist society of Russia. As a German Jew, although there was a terrible history from the Dark and Middle Ages of German Pogroms and ant-Semitism, Germany of 1917 was too civilized and modern to ever have attacks on Jews. She completely underestimated what the politicians of Russia and Germany would do to control their societies and pander to some while scapegoating and murdering Jews and other minorities. She herself was murdered by a German fascist anti-Semite 2 years after this statement.
Nasrallah claims to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad. Unlike some other Muslim fundamentalist terrorists and politicians who regard the Jews in Israel as enemies, Nasrallah is anti-Semitic and wants to kill all Jews, not just free the “holy land” from the Jewish presence. See {585748}.
Most of the Jews in the Vilnius ghetto were killed, many fighting the Germans. Kovner ironically survived.
This was one of the most hateful of his public speeches. He was one of the American “heroes” in Nazi Germany, receiving assistance from the Nazi government. Between his anti-Semitism and support for Hitler, Fascism and radical socialism, the Vatican ordered him off the air and shut down his political demagoguery.
He was distraught at the persecution his family was forced to endure in Germany.
This classic quote illustrates how rapidly things can change. A decade later most German Jews either emigrated or were murdered.
In 1933, there was still a some of anti-Semitism in America. The persecution of Jews in Germany was very clear at the time, just from the statements and writings by Adolf Hitler and other high level government officials and the laws that they were instituting and proposing. McFadden was one of the extreme isolationists in Congress at the time. They knew very little of the rest of the world, and believed the false assurances provided by German officials and American anti-Semitic, Fascist, pro Nazi partisans. McFadden’s statement was not only contrary to fact, but is among the most naïve of Congressional speeches.
Some bigots blamed the Jews for the Black Plague, then rampant. This is documentation of the Pope’s intercession to protect Jews. Pope Benedict XII, ?-1342, was an enlightened and moral leader who did not share the superstitions of many and realized that something was transmitting the disease. See {611790} for his behavior. The graphic is of the Pope.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico.