NEW REPUBLIC
by Leon Wieseltier
May 21, 2014

The love and the loyalty that I feel toward the United States is not only an expression of conviction. It is also an expression of gratitude. This country took in my parents when they were broken people looking for a beginning after an ending. They were two of the saving remnants of Polish Jewry, living traces of an erased world. They were seeking, well, life after death, and here they found it. But in the haven of refugees in which I was raised the feeling about America was more complicated. America had helped Jews after the war, but America had not helped Jews during the war. There had been no significant exertions of rescue. The reverence of the American Jewish community for Roosevelt (a friend once told me of his father, a retired garment worker, standing at Roosevelt’s grave at Hyde Park and saying kaddish for him) was not shared by the recent arrivals. The survivors were interventionists. It was a corollary of their experience in hell.

In the formation of my views about morality and power, and of my sense of an obligation to imagine the desperation of doomed people, this became a kind of primal scene. In 1944, for example, it was proposed to various officials of the American government that the Allies bomb the rail lines that carried the Jews of Hungary to the extermination camps in Poland, and that they bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz. In May, Michael Dov Ber Weissmandel, a Slovakian rabbi, pleaded: “How guilty will you feel in your hearts if you fail to move heaven and earth to help us in the only ways that are available to our own people and as quickly as possible? … For God’s sake, do something now and quickly.”

……The administration has made it clear that it will not grant the request of Ahmad Al Jarba, the president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, for effective weapons, though Jay Carney assured The Washington Post that Al Jarba’s meeting with Susan Rice, “with a possible drop-in by President Obama, is ‘part of our commitment to empower’ the opposition coalition.” The bystander has become an in-dropper. This hypocrisy is unbearable. Obama cannot act like John McCloy and talk like Raphael Lemkin. Retrenchment is retrenchment, and it should not be ornamented with soaring references to the Holocaust. Obama’s moist pronouncements do not disguise the stony raison d’état of his approach to atrocity. If, in the matter of responding to evil, the president is not prepared to “do something now and quickly,” as the rabbi once begged, then he should stifle himself. His words are insults.

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