Happy Birthday, President Harry S. Truman!
Gerald A. Honigman | Exclusive to Ekurd.net
May 8th was President Harry S. Truman’s birthday. So, a belated Happy Birthday, Harry!
While there’s other things for which President (“the buck stops here”) Truman is remembered, for many folks–of various nationalities and religions–he will also be recalled as the President who stood up to the perpetually Big Oil-linked folks in the State Department (and others as well) who fought him all the way down to the finish line over his decision to recognize the resurrected nation of the Jews on May 14, 1948.
And about the State Department and its buddies above?
No…they were not “just” anti-Zionist. Many were unabashed antisemites as well. Think Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and so forth.
I’ll never forget a prominent, non-Jewish professor of American history calling me over privately (so I won’t now reveal his name) to share what he discovered when the National Archives were allowed to be opened from that era: plain, old-fashioned antisemitism at work, along with the other excuses now offered for them.
Truman certainly was not perfect, and he had people in his own family who thought as the Foggy Folks did. Many still think this way today.
Indeed, much of the animus once reserved for the individual “killers of Prophets, sons of apes and pigs” dhimmi Jew of the “Arab”/Muslim world and the Christian West, has now–in a post-Auschwitz age–simply been transferred to the Jew of the Nations–Israel.
But, back in May 1948, Harry stood up on behalf of millennially oppressed, ghettoized, blood-libeled, demonized, massacred, expelled, Inquisitioned, genocidally-slaughtered, Church-declared “perpetually wandering, G-d killing” Jews by recognizing the Bible’s repeatedly-prophesied risen phoenix of the Jewish Sate in the wake of the extermination of one out of every three Jews on Planet Earth.
Half of Israel’s Jews (and many others who settled elsewhere ) would soon consist of tormented people who were forced to flee for their lives from “Arab”/Muslim lands after the combined Arab attack on Israel in 1948. They’re the millions of folks from refugee families that you seldom hear about.
Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews were not deliberately used as political pawns by their own brethren like some other refugees we know–stuck into refugee camps, denied citizenship in the many at the time, and now almost two dozen states which Arabs have on over six million square miles of territory–including one gifted to them right from the get-go in 1922 by the Brits on almost 80% of the original Mandate of Palestine’s territory. Find Israel on a world globe without a magnifying glass–I dare you.
And soon after Harry’s truly historic decision, he banned any arms shipment for the nascent state to be able to defend itself. True, it wasn’t just Israel being denied, but the Arab nations surrounding it which immediately attacked had oodles of armaments left over by Great Britain and the Allies from World War II, and so forth. Many countries were also already courting favor of Arab oil despots (including America).
Since those days in 1948, I’ve watched as Israel–constantly in the spotlight’s glare, unfairly vilified, subjected to hypocritical double standards–struggled as hard as humanly possible to honor the moral imperatives of its Hebraic traditions while fighting enemies who delight in disemboweling Jewish children and turning their own into shahids.
To understand the meaning of Israel Reborn to the Jew, one needs to know what Jewish history was like for two thousand years after the Jews took on the conqueror of the world for their independence. A reading of the contemporary Roman and Roman-sponsored historians–Tacitus, Pliny, Dio Cassius, Josephus, etc.–gives a “non-Zionist” account of the fervor with which Jews fought for the freedom of their land:
Vol. II, Book V, The Works of Tacitus:
Vespasian… succeeded to the command… it inflamed his resentment that Jews were the only nation that had not yet submitted…. Titus was appointed by his father to complete the subjugation of Judaea… He commanded three legions in Judaea itself… added the twelfth from Syria and the third and twenty-second from Alexandria…. Amongst his allies were a band of Arabs, formidable and harboring towards the Jews the bitter animosity usually subsisting between neighboring nations.
Apart from being the “native aboriginals” as they claim, note above that Arabs were acting like virtual vultures sweeping in for the mostly Roman kill.
Six centuries later, external Arab invaders and colonizers from the Arabian Peninsula would conquer the land of the Jews the same way they did the lands of native Coptic Egyptians, North African Amazigh/Kabyle/”Berbers,” black Africans, Assyrians, Kurds, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists (in points east), and others as well…and then have the audacity to claim the whole region as being “purely Arab patrimony” and forever part of the Dar ul-Islam.
Open http://q4j-middle-east.com and look at the Roman coin of conquest at the top: Iudaea (Judaea) Capta–not “Palaestina Capta.
The emperor Hadrian became so enraged at the Jews’ persistence that in 135 CE, after their second major revolt, he renamed Judaea Syria Palaestina–“Palestine”–after the Jews’ historic enemies (of David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, and so forth fame)…the non-Semitic, non-Arab Philistine “Sea People” invaders from the area around Crete, in an attempt to end the Jews’ hopes forever.
With all the real and potential sins of nationalism, if ever a people needed their own state just for their very survival, the Jews certainly are it. Even General Ulysses S. Grant (future US President) issued expulsion orders to the Jews of the American South during the Civil War.
So, from now on, when May 8th comes around, I hope you’ll celebrate the birthday of Harry S. Truman, an American leader more appreciated as the years go by. He would be unrecognizable when compared to many, if not most, of today’s fellow Democrats.
As a footnote, I am humbled to say that I share Harry’s birthday. It’s also VE—Victory in Europe—Day as well. On May 8,1945. Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered its armed forces.
And on May 8,1948, I made my own worldly debut on the birthday of the man who fought his State Department and other powerful folks on behalf of the Jewish people–within the very same week as the resurrection of the Jewish nation on May 14, 1948.
Gerald A. Honigman is a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs. He has created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, has lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated many Arab spokesmen. His articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world. You can visit his website at geraldahonigman.com Gerald A. Honigman is a longtime senior contributing writer, from 2007, and columnist for Ekurd.net. Honigman has published a major book, “The Quest For Justice In The Middle East–The Arab-Israeli Conflict In Greater Perspective.” For more see below.
The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Ekurd.net or its editors.
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