| melech_mike |
What Einstein taught Bush
By Jonathan Gurwitz
Genius or not, the president certainly mastered a very
important history lesson that many of his critics
either never did or are conveniently choosing to
forget.
| On Aug. 2, 1939, a Jewish scientist wrote a letter to the president of the United States, warning him that a fascist dictator
was working on a project to produce a new type of weapon that "if carried by a boat and exploded in a port might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory."
The scientist was Albert Einstein. The letter itself
was the product of conversations Einstein held with
Edward Teller and Leo Szilard, also Jewish scientists.
They met with presidential adviser Alexander Sachs,
himself Jewish, who agreed to deliver the letter to
the president, Franklin Roosevelt, personally.
The dictator was Adolph Hitler, and the weapon they
believed posed a threat to American and international
security was the atomic bomb.
Shortly thereafter, with the outbreak of World War II
in Europe, the American administration — against
popular sentiment — began supporting a small nation
under siege and its boisterous wartime leader with
large amounts of military and economic assistance.
Opponents charged that this lack of balance in U.S.
policy would drag the country into a war in which it
had no truck.
Opposition rallies took place across the United States
under the banner "America First," led by popular
figures such as national hero Charles Lindbergh. Both
on the left and the right, Americans demanded that the
administration focus on the homefront and economic
problems rather than pursuing a foreign agenda.
More extreme opponents claimed that American policy
was being unduly influenced by "international Jewry."
On December 11, 1941, four days after being attacked
by Imperial Japan, and after Germany had declared war
on the United States in fulfillment of the Tripartite
Pact, the United States declared war on Nazi Germany,
though Germany had not attacked it, nor did Germany
pose any immediate threat to the continental United
States. The result of this decision was that American
troops were sent to Africa, Italy and the shores of
France, siphoning off critical manpower and materiel
from the war against Japan.
The result of this decision was that American troops
were sent to Africa, Italy and the shores of France,
siphoning off critical manpower and materiel from the
war against Japan.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their lives in
the war in Europe, millions more European civilians
were killed. Cultural monuments were destroyed and
cities laid waste, including the baroque treasure of
Dresden, and priceless works of art disappeared or
were destroyed as Allied forces advanced on Berlin.
As the war drew to a close, Allied troops discovered
camps where the Nazis killed political opponents,
artists, intellectuals and one religious minority in
particular by the millions.
But in the end, nearly six years after Einstein had
warned Roosevelt about the threat of the first weapon
of mass destruction, Hitler had no atomic bomb.
There remains today a lunatic fringe of revisionist
historians who believe that the war in Europe was
contrived by Jews, that the Holocaust is a hoax whose
primary function is to extort money from innocent
Europeans and land from innocent Palestinians, and
that the true criminals of World War II were
Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Truman, not
Hitler, Tojo, Goebbels and Goering.
The advocates of such theories are normally recognized
for the frothing maniacs that they are.
But transfer such theories to the debate about the war
in Iraq, and you'll find them not only on the extreme
fringe of left- and right-wing politics, but front and
center, in major newspapers and periodicals, espoused
by columnists, politicians and professors without any
regard for context or the ironies of history, let
alone facts.
To read the fallacious charges today about the war in
Iraq is to re-read that history: that the war was
foisted on the United States by a neo-conservative
Jewish cabal; that President Bush is a puppet of the
war Cabinet of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon;
that the war was a diversion from the real threat
posed by al-Qaida and from more pressing economic
needs at home; that the destruction of buildings and
artifacts has greater moral bearing than the slaughter
of hundreds of thousands of innocent people; and that
the failure to find Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction renders his removal from power immoral.
Einstein, Teller and Szilard — three of the greatest
scientific minds of all history — were wrong about
Hitler's possession of atomic weapons, but not about
his drive to acquire them.
Given enough time, or unimpeded by Allied and
Norwegian commando attacks on the Nazi heavy water
plant at Vemork, Norway, Hitler might well have
developed the first useable atomic weapons. And the
world we live in would be a much different place.
Whether Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed useable
weapons of mass destruction at the beginning of 2003
and whether groups like al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad
have them today is less significant than their
well-established drive to acquire such weapons. And
terrorist groups like al Qaeda posed a threat to the
vital interests of the United States long before
September 11th, and Osama bin Laden had issued his
"fatwah" against the United States years before
President Bush declared war on terrorism. Likewise the
threat posed by weapons of mass destruction is there
today, even if few people take it seriously. Will it
require a December 7th or September 11th-type shock by
weapons of mass destruction before this threat is
fully recognized?
The day that useable nuclear, chemical or biological
weapons are wedded to the extremist, apocalyptic
ideologies of Islamo-fascism is the day our world
changes, and the day that Einstein's warning to
Roosevelt becomes a prophecy. |
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