Submitted by Martin, Jan 16, 2008 15:06

Prof. Wyman meticulously dissects and rejects the common excuses for the Holocaust. Failure of a Jewish State to exist was not one of them. Even among Jewish organizations there were conflicting goals. Some wanted to do all to save as many victims as possible, while others wanted to preserve limited resources and political influence to create a Jewish State after the War. The belief that bombing would have been worthless but a Jewish State somehow would have prevented the Holocaust is an additional excuse that Prof. Wyman's did not address in his book. Prof. Wyman believed that American policy contributed to the genocide. Even if Hitler had offered to let out all the Jews from occupied Europe, the Allies would not have taken them. An exchange offer of thousands of Hungarian Jews for 50,000 trucks went unanswered by the Allies. Excuses for the failure to rescue Jews, such as the lack of shipping, camps, funds and fear of Nazi infiltrators, stood in contrast to the resettlement of thousands of German POWs and refugees of other nationalities to the US, Canada and elsewhere. Jewish rescue had to be privately financed. Given the order, the bombing of lightly defended Auschwitz could easily have been undertaken. Heavily defended nearby military targets already were being attacked. Small US immigration quotas went unfilled during the War and deliberate efforts by the State Department to obstruct saving some of the doomed are well documented. Newspapers, including the Jewish owned NY Times, rarely printed stories about the extermination, and then generally only in back pages. An uninformed public could not influence a Congress or President to rescue more than a handful, mainly children. Politics, fear and a share of anti-semitism permeated many who made or carried out policy. The restrictive British policy of limiting Jewish emigration to Palestine, courting the Arabs to protect Suez, oil and their Empire, reluctantly allowing the formation of a Jewish brigade to fight for the Allies, all influenced and became a part of American policy. President Bush has many reasons besides that given in Dawidowicz's essay for supporting Israel. His particular Christian beliefs, support for democracies, a front line ally against Muslim extremism and terrorism, and politics at home make him a natural and strong supporter of Israel.

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