Conrad Theodore Seitz

Michele Bachman, one of our “Tea Party” congresspeople, visited Cairo with a Republican congressional delegation this week.  She gave remarks supporting the current government and telling them, “We are with you, and we encourage you.”  She cited the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, and referred to the attack on 9/11/2001, blaming them for that incident.  Apparently, to her, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, regardless of its legitimacy and its brutality.

Clearly, an endorsement from Ms. Bachman is not a good thing.  It puts you in the same category as her fantasies of what the USA should be like, not a pleasant thought at all.

This reminds me that two recent books have shown that Hollywood, in the 1930’s, suppressed movies that referred to Nazi brutality, and even managed to avoid using the word “Jew” entirely.  A review of the books can be found in last week’s New Yorker.  There were two personalities primarily responsible for this censorship, which was enabled by the timidity of the heads of the major studies, almost all of whom were Jewish(except for Fox studios).  They were first generation immigrants from Eastern Europe who had made a foresighted investment in the nickelodeon in 1905, and feared that their gains could be taken away easily by hostile companies or the government.  They feared that any reference to their plight would rebound into general disapproval of them.

So they toughed it out, allowing a man named Breen, a vicious anti-semite, to run the board that censored all Hollywood movies.  Breen was able to distort the rules of censorship, which required that “all countries be represented fairly”, to allow him to cut out any references to incidents or allegories of Nazi brutality.  At the same time, married couples slept in twin beds,  no one could profit in the long run from committing a crime, and there was always a happy ending to every movie.

What is even more incredible is that the Nazis had a consular official (a low level diplomat) in Los Angeles from 1934 to the late 30’s, who was able to insinuate himself into Hollywood society.  He was able to view advance copies of new movies and even look at scripts before production.  He made a number of demands for changes and cuts in scripts and finished movies, and some of them were followed.  He was helped by Breen, who had considerable power in Hollywood as the main censor.

It was not until the outbreak of general war that any anti-Nazi movies were made (other than a couple of allegories.)  We all remember “Casablanca”, but that didn’t come out until 1942.  Other movies, including a sequel to “All Quiet on the Western Front”, never got made.  There was no mention of Jews after “The Jazz Singer.”

It is sad that the Jews generally took a policy of trying to keep quiet about their problems for fear of annoying Gentiles.  The Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Defense League officially had keep-mum policies.  They seemed to hope that some one else would discover their plight and come to their aid spontaneously.  This did not happen, in most cases.  The Holocaust has a lot to do with why Israel is the way it is now.  The government refuses to stop settlement in occupied territories, that is those captured in the 1967 war (which Israel started as a pre-emptive strike in the face of huge Arab military buildups and vocal threats of destruction.)

The fact that Israelis regard the occupied territories as belonging to them is related to what was done to them in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  The refusal of many countries to accept Jewish refugees in the 1930’s was responsible for some of them being caught up in the SS meatgrinder.  Twelve million people were murdered in the concentration camps, only half of them Jewish.  The Nazis didn’t discriminate in choosing their victims, a fact which many people don’t realize.  Gypsies, homosexuals, mental patients, Polish intellectuals, Russian prisoners of war, Slavs generally, all were tossed into the ovens.

The Arab refusal to live with Jewish immigration in Palestine has led to the Jewish adoption of an aggressive policy of retaining land which is useful to them in making defensible borders for Israel and taking control of Jerusalem.  This policy is directly related to the over-the-top hostility of the Arabs towards anything Jewish, including sworn compacts to work towards the destruction of Israel.  Israelis have become so paranoid that they see nothing wrong with building a high wall around their settlements and cutting down all the Palestinian olive trees.

There is one non-negotiable term for a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians: the renunciation by Hamas of those elements in their charter which call for the complete destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the Jews.   That seems like a small thing to ask.  In return, the Palestinians might get nominal control of the Arab quarter of Jerusalem, as Clinton offered in 2000 and Arafat walked out on.