It’s been a constant refrain uttered by the Left, both religious and non-religious, that there is a direct comparison between those Jews who fled Nazism in the 1930’s and 1940’s and the hordes of Muslims arriving in Western nations. There isn’t. and I have previously called this dodgy comparison out as being false in a piece attacking a ‘Refugees Welcome Summit’ put on by members of the secular and religious Left.
I find it grossly insulting to the memory of those who died and to those who came to the UK or other safe countries because of projects such as the Kindertransport. This is because there is no honest sober comparison between the grateful, contributory, peaceful and loyal who the Kindertransport children and others turned out to be and the violent, poncing, welfar and job seeking, self entitled Muslims who are today posing as refugees.
The false comparison between the Muslim invasion and the genuine refugee status of many Jews in the past is utter wrong and it seems it is not just me and those like me who are noticing this disturbing false equivalence. Now there are people who experienced or managed to escape the Shoah, who are starting to speak up. They are speaking up against what they refer to as ‘demagogues’ who are using the Jewish experience of exile and of being genuine refugees, to promote a policy of entry to civilised nations for Muslim migrants. In my opinion it’s very good to hear those who have known the reality of exile and terror to speak up against those who are make excuses for those who are not fleeing terror, but like the Muslims are bringing terror wherever they go.
In a piece from the Jerusalem Post one of the Tehran Children, a group of Polish Jewish refugees who were sheltered in the Iranian capital following their flight into the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded Poland, has questioned whether the Muslim invaders should even be called refugees. The person who spoke out, Natan Rom, 87 a person whose family fled the brutality of the Hitler regime dismissed the idea that the Muslim invaders could be compared to those Jews who had fled genuine oppression. The Jerusalem Post is carrying the story about this remarkable and much needed challenge to the left both religious and non-religious Left, who have consistently made analogies between the Muslim ‘refugees’ and the refugees of the past. As is usual policy for this blog the original text is in italics whereas this blog’s comments are in plain text.
The Jerusalem Post said:
A prominent Israeli Holocaust survivor from Poland who lived through World War II as a refugee in Russia spoke out what he called “demagogues who falsely compare persecuted Jews to migrants from Syria.”
The falsehood that there are direct analogies between the Muslim migrants and the refugee Jews of the past is one that also rankles with me. Mr Rom is also correct in calling those who are pushing the ‘refugees welcome’ policy, despite growing evidence that it’s a compete disaster, are indeed behaving like demagogues.
Natan Rom, 87, who is among the best-known survivors of the group of refugees known as the Tehran Children, spoke out against recent analogies in international media during an interview ahead of the Russia première of a 2007 documentary film about the group’s trials.
“The Muslim migrants arriving to Europe are for the most part not refugees but job seekers who belong to what is de facto an invasion,” Rom, nee Norbert Kurtzman, told JTA after the Russia première of the film “The Children of Tehran” in the city of Kazan during its Limmud FSU conference of Jewish learning.
Mr Rom is correct there cannot and should not be direct analogies made between the Muslim migrants and those who fled tyrants like Hitler. In my opinion such an analogy is not only a gross falsehood but is an insult to those who have genuinely fled oppression and who have not only treated the nations who gave them shelter with gratitude but who have often made great contributions to them.
“The attempts to pass off the new arrivals, people who left and in many cases participated in a murderous civil war, as refugees and then to liken their experiences to what Holocaust survivors had to endure is false,” Rom, who survived the Holocaust with his sister, said last month.
Mr Rom is only really saying what many of us who are ‘Islamo-sceptical’ have been saying for years, often to no avail. Many of us have gone to our Rabbis and the Christians have gone to their Vicars and others to express concern about this false comparison. We have said to those who purport to lead religious movements both Jewish and Christian that ‘this is not the same situation as before’, this is not 1940 this is not innocent people fleeing oppression. We have explained why it’s a bad idea to have a naïve attitude to the hordes of Muslims massing at the shores of the Med or crossing the Balkans into Eastern Europe. When we’ve brought these matters up with our religious leaders we’ve been ignored, sidelined and sometimes insulted. We’ve been called ‘racists’, ‘xenophobes’, ‘Islamophobes’ and a whole lot more merely for pointing out similar things to what Mr Rom has said.
The rebuke by Rom, a supporter of the left-wing Meretz party and one of the founders of Kibbutz Afikim, followed the publication in August of an op-ed in The New York Times titled “Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl,” in which the journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof argued that the reasons for the opposition to absorbing Jewish Holocaust refugees in the United States “were the same as they are for rejecting Syrians or Hondurans today.”
While some European Jews have repeated the analogy, others have been careful to avoid it amid the arrival to Europe of 1.5 million immigrants since 2015 from the war-torn Middle East and Africa. While many of those arriving file for refugee status, critics of EU immigration policies have argued for stricter screening against job seekers, citing the heavy presence among the newcomers of work-age men.
Here we have in Mr Rom a man who has escaped real murderous horror, whose childhood was disrupted in ways that we in the west cannot imagine and who is a high profile Leftist, calling time on the lie that the Muslims hell bent on an invasion of Europe can be compared to the plight of peaceful Jewish refugees. Maybe those Rabbis and Vicars who have been banging the ‘refugees welcome’ drum with such loud and manic strokes, and who have refused to listen to those who have expressed discomfort with the false analogies between the Muslim migrants and Jewish refugees, will listen to Mr Rom?
Mr Rom is a man who has lived the refugee experience and can clearly see the difference between his experience and those who make up the bulk of the Muslim migrants. I do hope that those in authority, especially those in religious authority and who have so far failed to heed all warnings that the ‘refugees welcome’ policy is a disaster, will take heed of Mr Rom’s wise words.
Those religious leaders who are continually quoting the Biblical passage that ‘you shall not oppress the stranger’ are failing to see that this band of Muslim migrants are not ‘the oppressed’ but are instead the oppressor. These Muslim migrants are not the ‘new Jews’, but are the old barbarian invaders that have threatened Europe in the past and threaten the continent again. It’s time for our religious leaders to wake up and listen to the warnings given by Mr Rom and others and wake up before it’s too late. .
Links
Original story from Jerusalem Post
The story of the Tehran Children who escaped Hitler via the Soviet Union, Iran and then to safety in Mandate Palestine.
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007498
The religious and secular Leftists who took part in a ‘refugees welcome’ summit in Birmingham earlier this year
I have just come back from a holiday in Poland. One of our guides told us that 95% of the country’s population identify as Catholic, the majority of them being practising (lots of evidence of that wherever you go) and that the country has only two mosques. I got the impression that they also have no desire that there should be any more of them.
I also, for the first time in my life, visited Auschwitz. It became clear to me that the idea that whatever deprivations the ‘refugees’ might have had to put up with can be compared to what its inmates endured and the children of the Kindertransport escaped is positively obscene, as is the extreme Left’s habitual comparison of opponents of mass immigration to their guards and to those who gave the guards their orders.
Thank you for your comment. I concur with you that the false equivalence that the Left draws between the dangerous ‘refugees’ of today’s world and the victims of the Shoah is indeed obscene. As I’ve said in another article ( https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2016/09/09/the-birmingham-refugees-welcome-summit-a-meeting-point-of-holy-fools-and-cynical-political-operators/ ) the Kindertransport children went on to make great contributions to society and were no more criminal than the general population at the time. You cannot say that about the current wave of Islamic savages posing as ‘refugees’.