Tag: Holocaust

Jerusalem Post Chides Mike Huckabee for Holocaust Analogy

Adding to the fallout over Mike Huckabee’s ill-advised comparison of the Iran nuclear treaty to the Holocaust, the Jerusalem Post rebuked the GOP presidential hopeful earlier today.
Certainly, the Israelis oppose the Iran deal but lament that Huckabee’s comment make it harder to secure the opposition necessary to derail it. The Post says:

As for sense, Huckabee’s comment just made it tougher for Israel and its allies in Washington to round up Democratic votes needed to override a presidential veto.

Huckabee made the remarks last Saturday:

Speaking with Breitbart News Saturday, the former Arkansas governor called Barack Obama “feckless” and “naive,” adding that by signing the deal the President “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”

Huckabee hasn’t backed away except to claim he wasn’t comparing President Obama to Hitler.
The JPost disagrees:

But in Netanyahu’s analogy, the Obama administration and the West are playing the role of Neville Chamberlain. Huckabee, on the other hand, cast President Barack Obama as Hitler when the Republican presidential hopeful declared that the Iran deal “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” 

Huckabee’s rhetoric doesn’t appear to be helping him with evangelicals. In a survey of evangelical leaders from World magazine, only 4% of participants favored Huckabee as their first choice.
 

Glenn Beck, Raoul Wallenberg, and the Mysterious Russian Soldier: Embellishing an Already Great Story

Glenn Beck used a lot of artifacts to tell his stories during his July 5, 2015 talk at Fellowship Church in the Fort Worth are. Previously, I have commented on his false account of the Aitken Bible story and his theological statement  that America is a covenant nation. Today, I want to comment on his story about Raoul Wallenberg. First, listen to what Glenn Beck said about Wallenberg.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/aeX_-Vwid_8[/youtube]
Transcript:

This is a document from Raoul Wallenberg. Raoul Wallenberg is one of my heroes. He was a Swedish emissary at the embassy during the 2nd World War and he tried to stand up for the Jews.  This is a passport.
His King told him, ‘don’t do this, we have enough trouble, please don’t do this, we have enough trouble.’ But he was in Budapest and he saw what was happening to the Jews and he stood up.
And he would go to the train cars where they had taken all the Jews and he would take these, a handful of them and stuff them between the slats of the train while standing on top of the train and then he’d finally give them in and say everybody take one of these, quickly take one, and he would say, ‘Stop! Stop the train! You have the wrong people, you have my citizens in there! He saved thousands.
This is one of the last ones that he wrote, the woman he wrote it for begged him to leave; he wouldn’t.  He said, ‘the Russians couldn’t be as bad as the Germans, and the Russians were right around the corner. He was last seen running into the arms of the Russian military. This is a cigarette case that was carried by one of those soldiers that he ran into the arms of. One of the first troops that came in. Wallenberg ran up to them and begged them for help, ‘help, help me save the Jews, help me save, stop this insanity. What’s on this cigarette case in Russian is carved, ‘Let’s kill all of the Jews and go home.’
Anti-semitism, hatred, racism is a human disease. We must look for the answers outside of the human race. We must look for the answers in God and Jesus Christ.

This story didn’t sound quite right. The part about Wallenberg saving Jews is right but the cigarette case component seemed like an embellishment. How would anyone know that about the cigarette case? Wallenberg disappeared after the liberation of Budapest and was never seen as a free man in public. He left behind no written accounts.
Curious about it, I contacted the Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the United States. Diane Blake is Director of Research and former Vice Chairman of The Raoul Wallenberg Committee. She graciously agreed to watch and evaluate Beck’s clip. Her initial assessment is as follows:

I have never heard anything about a Russian soldier with a hateful cigarette case.  I doubt that it is true.  I do know that Raoul had the support of the Swedish king and Swedish government when he went to Budapest.  When the United States formed the War Refugee Board, they were looking for a Christian from a neutral country to go to Budapest and try to save the last intact Jewish community in Europe.  They approached Sweden and Sweden agreed and Raoul was chosen.
Raoul certainly did not give himself up to Russian soldiers, pleading for help for the Jews.  Raoul got into the car with two Russian soldiers because he had an appointment with Marshal Malinovsky in Debrecen to discuss the next steps for Hungary, i.e.,  the search for missing persons and the reuniting of families, emergency food distribution, help with housing, etc.

Blake’s assessment of the Swedish king agrees the sources I can find on the subject. If Beck has a source where Gustav V actually spoke to Wallenberg and asked him not to go to Budapest, I would like to see it.  King Gustav actually intervened with the Hungarian regime to stop the deportation of Hungarian Jews to death camps. The Swedes were already involved in trying to save Jews in Hungary before Wallenberg was selected for his mission. Beck’s comment about the Swedish king certainly seems like an unnecessary embellishment.
Beck’s story of the cigarette case doesn’t add anything substantial to the story except it gave him an opportunity to show off another collector’s item. According to Blake, Wallenberg was taken into custody and never seen again.

On January 17, 1945,  somewhere en route to Marshal Malinovsky’s headquarters, Raoul and his driver (Vilmos Langfelder) were handed over to the NKVD.  By the first week of February, 1945, they were in separate cells in Moscow’s Lubianka Prison.  Raoul was never seen as a free man again.

In fact, the Russians liberated Budapest and saved the remaining Jewish population. Wallenberg was suspected of being an American spy and for reasons that are not still not totally clear was never released.
Essentially, Beck had it right that Raoul Wallenberg helped save thousands of Jews. However, why embellish? Why over dramatize something that is already amazing?

Scott Lively spoke to 10,000 people in Uganda; fights off hate group charge

Scott Lively is not slowing down. He spoke recently to the Murrieta/Temecula Republican Assembly about his book, the Pink Swastika. This meeting was a slated for one venue but was moved due to worries about a possible protest from gay groups – in particular PFLAG.
The whole speech is now on YouTube via the account of the GOP group, Bob Kowell.

In this installment, Lively says he spoke to 10,000 people in Uganda. He also describes his battle with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Because of his advocacy of the thesis that homosexuals were behind the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, two groups he is involved with (Abiding Truth Ministries and Watchmen on the Walls) are on the SPLC list of hate groups.
In his speech, Mr. Lively has answered back his critics at SPLC. He also recently launched a new blog called HateWatch Watch. He claims his groups are unfairly placed on the list.
I asked Grove City College colleague and history prof, JonDavid Wyneken, to evaluate Lively’s thesis. Dr. Wyneken pointed me to a couple of resources which help refute the idea that a homosexual cult was the organized, driving force behind Nazism. One is in a book by esteemed historian Richard Evans, titled, The Third Reich in Power. On pages 529-535, Evans provides information which gives necessary perspective. Specifically, Evans indicates that the Nazis toughened laws against homosexual contact and stepped up their arrests of homosexuals between 1936 to 1938. Evans notes,

“The raids and arrests were co-ordinated from 1 October 1936 by a new Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homsexuality and Abortion, building on the Gestapo department created to deal with the same area in the wake of the Roehm purge, which gave fresh impetus to the wave of persecutions.” (p. 533, 2005).

Dr. Wyneken also provided a link to a document published by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., by historian Geoffrey J. Giles. Note this brief excerpt describing the views of Himmler about homosexuals. Himmler was not gay. In his young adult years, Himmler read a book by an author – Hartner – and approved of the perspective.

Hartner’s thesis was that an unchecked expansion of the phenomenon of homosexuality would lead quite literally to the “destruction of mankind” (Untergang der Menschheit). He lost himself in speculation about a giant conspiracy, inspired of course by Jews, among whom there was “contrary to Hirschfeld’s assertion, a greater [proportion of homosexuals] by far than in the German population” as a whole. What was the aim of these Jewish homosexuals? They were trying to push Germany down the slippery slope of “increasing infertility” that the French had been sliding down for ages.
You may well wonder whether, if more homosexuals meant fewer babies, that would not have an equally or even more damaging effect on the “heavily homosexual” Jewish people. No, because they, and especially the hated Ostjuden, were still positively infused with a
Zionism that provided an unquenchable fuel for an “unbroken will to fertility” (ungebrochener Fruchtbarkeitswille). The heterosexual Jews would simply produce more babies. Germans lacked this sense of nationalistic mission. Hartner declared in a closing flourish to his chapter that this spread of homosexuality would “surely dig our
graves.” One can almost sense young Himmler (still only twenty-seven years old) shuddering in agreement with these sentiments.

I warn you this paper is not for the squeamish but it gives a perspective regarding homosexuality and the Nazis in contrast to that of Scott Lively. Giles makes it clear that homosexuals were not behind the Nazi movement but rather the victims of it.