Good Germans

 

 Henry Morgenthau Jr. risked his career during World War II to show FDR pictures of the Nazi death camps. He wasn't the only one to inform our wartime president of the six million Jews caught up in the worst genocide of the twentieth century. But as a member of FDR's cabinet and a trusted friend, Morgenthau was listened to. As it turned out, the US State Department had been misleading FDR, calling the planned murder of Jews nothing but a "war rumor."

The current slaughter of the Palestinian people is much better known. From 1948 on, Israel has instituted a plan of action "with the intent to destroy in whole or in parts a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." At least that is how international law defines genocide. The extermination of the Palestinians people has been condemned or defended since the end of WW II. But it hasn't really been hidden.  

Even the murder of 20,000 children in Gaza has lost its horror. We turn away because we know the pain that it will bring us. We protect ourselves by debating how the data was collected or verified. We shake our heads and try to move on.

Of course that is what every "good German" did during the Holocaust, although they faced a far greater penalty for speaking the truth. We are sometimes called antisemitic, but we don't get hanged or shot for exposing the mass murder of the Palestinian people. Isn't it time we all did more?

Fred Nagel