American citizens are at risk for Donald Trump illegal deportations! Shades of 1930s Germany

 A dark day for American justice and due process.

Nazi Germany nightmare, El Salvadore is a nighmare!

Echo opinion letters published in the Houson Chronicle

Dark Day for due process:  Protect immigrant rights

Regarding "Trump says he wants to imprison US citizens in El Salvador. That's likely illegal," (April 15): If you feel that you are safe from deportation because you are a citizen, 💭think again❗ Trump's press secretary told the media that the administration is "considering" the possibility of "deporting" U.S. citizens.😵‍💫😡

If you have committed any serious crimes — the seriousness of which is to be determined by the administration — you may find yourself on a plane to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), in El Salvador leaving friends and family wondering where you are.

And if you think that the law will save you, consider the fact that the Supreme Court gave Trump just enough wiggle room to "disappear" those immigrants to El Salvador. You should also remember that it was the court that gave the president the "presumptive immunity" to commit such acts back in 2024.

From Carl Lloyd, in San Antonio Texas

El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele and Donald Trump scoffed at the idea of sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia back, even though the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the administration to "facilitate" his return.

Since when did the word "facilitate" take on the new meaning of "do nothing"❓ 

It is disgraceful that Donald Trump just sat there and nodded while Bukele said he won't return Abrego Garcia to the United States. 

As if Bukele had all the power when the Trump administration is paying (with U.S. tax money) for this innocent man to be held in El Salvador.

This is a certainly a dark day for our country. A very dark day.

From Katherine Butler, in Houston Texas

Jews were "deported"—transported by trains or trucks to six camps, all located in occupied Poland: Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek-Lublin.

President Biden honors Holocaust Remembrance Day at the United States Capitol

President Biden delivered these remarks on Tuesday at the Capitol for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance.

President Biden speaking at the Capitol

Transcript published in The New York Times:

Thank you, for that introduction, for your leadership of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. You’re a true scholar and statesman and a dear friend. Speaker Johnson, Leader Jeffries, members of Congress and especially the survivors of the Holocaust. If my mother were here, she’d look at you and say, “God love you all. God love you all.”

Remember those lost in the Holocaust (Yom HaShoah)

Abe Foxman and all of the survivors who embody absolute courage and dignity and grace are here as well. 

During these sacred days of remembrance, we grieve. We give voice to the six million Jews who were systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. We honor the memory of victims, the pain of survivors, the bravery of heroes who stood up to Hitler’s unspeakable evil. And we recommit to heading and heeding the lessons of one of the darkest chapters in human history, to revitalize and realize the responsibility of never again.
 
Never again, simply translated for me, means never forget. Never forget. Never forgetting means we must keep telling the story, must keep teaching the truth, must keep teaching our children and our grandchildren. The truth is, we are at risk of people not knowing the truth. That’s why growing up, my dad taught me and my siblings about the horrors of the Shoah at our family dinner table. That’s why I visited Yad Vashem with my family as a senator, as vice president, as president. And that’s why I took my grandchildren to Dachau, so they could see and bear witness to the perils of indifference, the complicity of silence, in the face of evil they knew was happening.

Germany 1933, Hitler and his Nazi Party’s rise to power by rekindling one of the oldest forms of prejudice and hate: antisemitism. His role didn’t begin with mass murder; it started slowly across economic, political, social and cultural life. Propaganda demonizing Jews. Boycotts of Jewish businesses. Synagogues defaced with swastikas. Harassment of Jews in the street and the schools, antisemitic demonstrations, pogroms, organized riots. With the indifference of the world, Hitler knew he could expand his reign of terror by eliminating Jews from Germany, to annihilate Jews across Europe through genocide, the Nazis called the final solution. Concentration camps, gas chambers, mass shootings. By the time the war ended, six million Jews — one of every three Jews in the entire world — were murdered.

Never Forget: Remembering the Holocaust

This ancient hatred of Jews didn’t begin with the Holocaust. It didn’t end with the Holocaust either. Or after — even after our victory in World War II. This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people in the world and requires our continued vigilance and outspokenness. That hatred was brought to life on October 7th of 2023. On the sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas unleashed the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the Earth, over 1,200 innocent people, babies, parents, grandparents, slaughtered in a kibbutz, massacred at a music festival, brutally raped, mutilated and sexually assaulted.

Thousands more carrying wounds, bullets and shrapnel from a memory of that terrible day they endured. Hundreds taken hostage, including survivors of the Shoah. Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven and half months later and people are already forgetting. They are already forgetting. That Hamas unleashed this terror. It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten nor have you. 

And we will not forget.

As Jews around the world still cope with the atrocity and the trauma of that day and its aftermath, we have seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world. Vicious propaganda on social media. Jews forced to keep their — hide their kippahs under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts. On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class. Antisemitism, antisemitic posters, slogans, calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.

Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews. It’s absolutely despicable, and it must stop. Silence and denial can hide much, but it can erase nothing. Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be married — buried — no matter how hard people try.




In my view, a major lesson of the Holocaust is, as mentioned earlier, it is not — was not — inevitable. We know hate never goes away; it only hides. Given a little oxygen, it comes out from under the rocks. We also know what stops hate. One thing: All of us. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sachs described antisemitism as a virus that has survived and mutated over time. Together, we cannot continue to let that happen. We have to remember our basic principle as a nation.

We have an obligation, an obligation to learn the lessons of history so we don’t surrender our future to the horrors of the past. We must give hate no safe harbor against anyone. Anyone. From the very founding, our very founding, Jewish Americans represented only about 2 percent of the U.S. population and helped lead the cause of freedom for everyone in our nation. From that experience, we know scapegoating and demonizing any minority is a threat to every minority and the very foundation of our democracy.

It’s in moments like this we have to put these principles that we’re talking about into action. I understand people have strong beliefs and deep convictions about the world. In America, we respect and protect the fundamental right to free speech. To debate, disagree, to protest peacefully, make our voices heard. I understand, that’s America. But there is no place on any campus in America — any place in America — for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind. Whether against Jews or anyone else. Violent attacks, destroying property is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. And we are not a lawless country. We’re a civil society. We uphold the rule of law, and no one should have to hide or be brave just to be themselves.

The Jewish community, I want you to know: I see your fear, your hurt, your pain. Let me reassure you, as your president, you’re not alone. You belong. You always have and you always will. And my commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad even when we disagree.

My administration is working around the clock to free remaining hostages. Just so we have freed hostages already. And we will not rest until we bring them all home. My administration, with our second gentleman’s leadership, has launched our nation’s first national strategy to counter antisemitism that’s mobilizing the full force of the federal government to protect Jewish community, but we know it’s not the work of government alone or Jews alone.

That’s why I’m calling on all Americans to stand united against antisemitism and hate in all its forms. My dear friend, he became a friend, the late Elie Wiesel said, quote: “One person of integrity can make a difference.” We have to remember that now more than ever. Here in the Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol, among the towering statues of history, is a bronze bust of Raoul Wallenberg. Born in Sweden, as a Lutheran, he was a businessman and a diplomat. While stationed in Hungary during World War II, he used diplomatic cover to hide and rescue about 100,000 Jews over a six-month period.

Among them was a 16-year-old Jewish boy who escaped a Nazi labor camp. After the war ended, that boy received a scholarship from the Hillel Foundation to study in America. He came to New York City penniless but determined to turn his pain into purpose, along with his wife, also a Holocaust survivor. He became a renowned economist and foreign policy thinker, eventually making his way to this very Capitol on the staff of a first-term senator.

That Jewish refugee was Tom Lantos, and that senator was me. Tom and his wife, Annette, and their family became dear friends to me and my family. Tom would go on to become the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress, where he became a leading voice on civil rights and human rights around the world. Tom never met Raoul, who was taken prisoner by the Soviets, never to be heard from again. But through Tom’s efforts, Raoul’s bust is here in the Capitol. He was also given honorary U.S. citizenship, only the second person ever after Winston Churchill.

The Holocaust Museum here in Washington is located on a roll — road — in Raoul’s name. The story of the power of a single person to put aside our differences, to see our common humanity, to stand up to hate and its ancient story of resilience from immense pain, persecution, to find hope, purpose and meaning in life we try to live and share with one another. That story endures.

Let me close with this. I know these days of remembrance fall on difficult times. We all do well to remember these days also fall during the month we celebrate Jewish American heritage. A heritage that stretches from our earliest days to enrich every single part of American life today. Great American — great Jewish American — Tom Lantos used the phrase the veneer of civilization is paper-thin. We are its guardians, and we can never rest.

My fellow Americans, we must, we must be those guardians. We must never rest. We must rise against hate, meet across the divide, see our common humanity. And God bless the victims and survivors of the Shoah. May the resilient hearts, courageous spirit and eternal flame of faith of the Jewish people shine their light on America and all around the world. Praise God. Thank you all.

Antisemitism in Nazi Germany and Communism created barbaric totalitarian evil systems where many millions were murdered

The swastika stands for evil and mass murder. 

So does the hammer and sickle.

In January, two gruesome anniversaries are noted in the history of 20th-century totalitarianism. Echo opinion published in The Boston Globe by Jeff Jacoby:

Russian Revolution of 1917, Revolution that overthrew the imperial government and placed the Bolsheviks in power.

Sunday was the centennial of the death of Vladimir Lenin. The architect of the Bolshevik Revolution and first ruler of the Soviet Union was 53 when he died of a brain hemorrhage on January 21, 1924, in Russia.

From among 230 000 children deported to KL Auschwitz only 700 were liberated.

Saturday was the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the extermination camp in Poland where 1.1 million victims were murdered by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1945. The United Nations in 2005, designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Why has the UN never dedicated a similar day of remembrance for the victims of communism?

In fact, the communist system introduced by Lenin led to more slaughter and suffering than any other movement in history. 

For sheer murderous horror, there has never been a force to compare to it. The Nazis didn’t come close. Although the Adolf Hitler’s evil regime eradicated 6 million Jews in the unprecedented genocide of the Holocaust, the Germans also killed at least 5 million non-Jews, among them ethnic Poles, prisoners of war, Romani people, and the disabled.

But the Nazi toll adds up to barely a tenth of the lives that have been extinguished by communist dictatorships. 

According to “The Black Book of Communism,” a magisterial compendium of communist crimes first published in France in 1997, the fanaticism unleashed by Lenin’s revolution has sent at least 100 million men, women, and children to early graves. 

Beginning in 1917, communist regimes on four continents — from Russia and Eastern Europe to China and North Korea to Cuba and Ethiopia — engineered death on a scale unmatched in human annals.

Yet communism rarely evokes the instinctive loathing that Nazism does. To this day there are those who still insist that communism is admirable and wholesome, or that it has never been properly implemented, or that with all its failings it is better than capitalism. Many people who would find it unthinkable to deck themselves in Nazi regalia — when Britain’s Prince Harry wore a swastika armband to a costume party in 2005, a major scandal ensued — view communist-themed fashion as trendy or kitschy.

In Manhattan’s East Village, the popular KGB Bar — named after the USSR’s terrifying security network of secret police and torture sites — features Soviet propaganda posters and literary readings. Would any New York hipster ever set foot in a pub called Gestapo?

Amazon sells scores of shirts with hammer-and-sickle designs or the images of communist dictators like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, who were among the greatest mass killers in history. Search for “Nazi T-shirts,” on the other hand, and what comes up are shirts showing a swastika in a red circle with a slash (“No Nazis”) or proclaiming: “Punch a Nazi.”

What accounts for the difference? Both Nazism and communism filled the world with pain, terror, and death. Yet communists are not regarded with the same revulsion that Nazis are. 

In the public’s perception, Hitler and his Nazi Party have no equal as incarnations of supreme evil. Why isn’t communist tyranny viewed the same way?

A number of reasons suggest themselves.

First: In the war against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union ended up fighting alongside the Allies. World War II gave way to the long-drawn-out Cold War, but America’s alliance with Moscow left in many minds the belief that when it mattered most, the communists were on our side. 

Really❓ Russia on "our side"❓

After all, the free world had labeled Nazis as the supreme evil. So anyone who helped destroy Nazis must not have been supremely evil themselves.

Second: The Nazis made little effort to disguise the abhorrent malignance on which their movement was based, above all its genocidal antisemitism. They made no secret of their implacable hatred for Jews and other “subhumans” or their belief that an Aryan master race should rule the world. Conversely, communist movements have almost always cloaked their malice and brutality with tempting rhetoric about equality, peace, and an end to exploitation. Partly as a result, the myth persists to this day that communism is really a noble ideology with the potential to liberate mankind.

Third: Nazism was utterly discredited by the fate meted out to Nazi Germany — unconditional surrender, an Allied occupation, war-crimes trials, and the hanging of senior Nazis. By contrast, communist dictatorships in Moscow and elsewhere entrenched their hold on power. The end of the Cold War eventually brought down communist governments in Russia and Europe, but even then, there was no public accounting for the ghastly crimes they had committed.

Fourth: The Holocaust became such a “byword for modern barbarism,” as the authors of “The Black Book of Communism” put it, that even mass murders of greater magnitude in the communist world seem to recede in significance. In crucial ways, the Holocaust stands alone: Nazi 卐 Germany deployed every resource at its command to construct a vast industry of death with the goal of rounding up and destroying every single Jew in Europe — not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. There is good reason that so much attention has been paid to the Holocaust by scholars, historians, educators, and artists.

As a result, however, the far greater level of bloodshed committed by communist regimes has never achieved the same public awareness.

Fifth: There are pictures of what the Nazis did. Filmmakers and photographers entered the death camps in 1945, and recorded what they found, providing images that shocked the world’s conscience and became iconic emblems of human savagery. But there were no Allies to liberate the Soviet gulag or to halt the agonies of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. If there are photos or films of those atrocities, few have ever seen them. The victims of communism have tended to be invisible — and suffering that isn’t seen is suffering most people don’t think about.

These are explanations only, not justifications. Nazism was unspeakably evil and only an ignoramus or a monster would deny it. Communism, too, has been unspeakably evil — no “ism” in history has spilled more blood or crushed more lives. From anyone with a conscience or a working moral compass, the response to both should be the same: Never forget, never forgive.

Journalist Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby. To subscribe to Arguable, his weekly newsletter, visit globe.com/arguable.

Holocaust restitution in Latvia

Six million Jews. One and a half million Jewish children. When we remember the Holocaust, the numbers are overwhelming. It can be hard, sometimes, to remember that each number, each statistic, was a person with a name, a face, a life, a family. 

Honoring Yom HaShoah

They had pasts and presents and potential for the future.

Echo report published in The Times of Isreal, an Associated Press story, February 9, 2022:  

Latvia passes long-awaited Holocaust restitution law, aims to revitalize Jewish life.

Parliament approves spending $45 million over ten years on its 9,500-strong Jewish community; will provide social and material assistance to survivors.

T
The memorial stone is placed on the ruins of the Riga (the nation's capital city) Choral Synagogue burned to the ground by Nazis in 1941, in memory of those who perished in the blaze, seen in Riga, Latvia, on February 10, 2022. (Roman Koksarov/AP)

HELSINKI, Finland — Latvia’s parliament passed a Holocaust restitution bill Thursday, (Feb. 10, 2022) that includes compensation for lost Jewish property and funding to revitalize the Baltic nation’s Jewish community, which was almost completely wiped out during World War II.

Following years of wrangling over the issue, lawmakers in the 100-seat Saeima voted 64-21 to approve the Law on the Compensation of Goodwill to the Latvian Jewish Community on the bill’s final reading.

The bill authorizes spending 40 million euros ($45 million) over 10 years to revitalize Latvia’s 9,500-strong Jewish community, provide social and material assistance to Holocaust survivors, and to fund Jewish schools, building restoration and cultural projects.

Latvia was occupied in June 1940, by the Soviet Red Army, which was pushed away a year later by Nazi Germany’s advancing troops. Moscow retook Latvia in late 1944, and the country remained part of the Soviet Union until it gained independence in 1991.
Lengthy negotiations involving the World Jewish Restitution Organization, or WJRO, Latvian Jewish representatives and government authorities started in 2005. The United States and Israel also were involved in the talks.

Some 95,000 Jewish people lived in Latvia before World War II. The thriving prewar community suffered enormous losses during the Nazi occupation. By the time the Red Army re-occupied Latvia, an estimated 90% of the country’s Jews had perished.

Jewish community members were prevented from recovering the property they owned in June 1940, when Latvia’s first Soviet occupation started, due to near-total destruction. The Soviet Union first seized those properties, which were then taken over by the Nazis, again nationalized by the Soviet Union and later become property of the Latvian state.

After independence in 1991, Latvia introduced laws on returning nationalized property. But the issue was left unresolved with no one left to claim the assets of Jews. The remuneration provided in the legislation refers to “goodwill compensation” by Latvia, a nation of 2.8 million, for unrecovered Jewish property.

Capital of Latvia in Riga

Decades after the Holocaust, many European countries have taken steps to compensate the families of prewar Jewish property owners, although the picture is very mixed.

Poland, which was home to the largest Jewish population of Europe, has not adopted any legislation that would regulate the return of property or provide compensation to prewar owners.

In many cases, properties first seized by the Nazis were later nationalized by Poland’s communist regime. The vast majority of those dispossessed were not Jewish, but the issue looms large in Poland’s relationship with Israel and the United States.

Poland passed a law last year that restricts the rights of Holocaust survivors or their descendants to reclaim property. It sparked a major diplomatic crisis with Israel which has still not been resolved.

Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust

#NeverForgetTheHolocaust

The Butterfly
The last, the very last, 

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. 

Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing against a white stone… Such, such a yellow 

Is carried lightly ‘way up high. It went away, I'm sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye. 

For seven weeks I've lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto. 

But I have found my people here. The dandelions call to me And the.

white chestnut candles in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live in here, In the ghetto. Pavel Friedmann 4.6.1942.

Joshua M. Greene

Opinion echo published in the Capital Gazette, a Maryland newspaper.

The further the Holocaust recedes into history, the more we witness a dangerous trend toward substituting generic commemoration for the specifics of what occurred. A lighting of candles, a recitation of names and a promise to never forget are the staples of Days of Remembrance commemorations during Yom HaShoah.

What exactly we should never forget is not always explained, and this drift away from the details has taken its toll.

According to a survey conducted in 2020 by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, nearly two-thirds of Americans between 18 and 39 do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

The tendency to oversimplify the Holocaust was driven home for me recently when a community group called for advice on a film they wanted to produce about survivors living near us on Long Island. They submitted a promotional flier about their project, which read, "These men and women are heroes who embody all that is noble in the human spirit. Their will to survive is an inspiration to us all."

Time out. Are we to assume that the 6 million Jews who did not survive lacked “human spirit” and were bereft of “the will to survive”? In 30 years of research, I’ve screened perhaps 200 hours of survivors’ video testimony, and I cannot recall any of them ever describing themselves as heroes. The Long Island filmmakers were not trying to revise or sanitize Holocaust history, they were simply unaware of how easy it is to propagate inaccuracies.

It is an understandable temptation. After all, who wants to dwell on, or even be exposed to, unspeakable atrocities? Yet without dedicating at least some time to a candid and unedited examination of what happened, Holocaust commemorations risk perpetuating sanitized impressions that, in the extreme, might fuel denial: It couldn't have been so bad. Look at the heroes who survived. They built the state of Israel, they started new family lines, they have a good life — how bad could it have been?

The need for an overhaul of Holocaust remembrance is not only a matter of getting history right but of preventing its repetition. There are substantial issues that deserve inclusion in commemorations, many of them relevant to recent events, such as the inflammatory power of demagogues to radicalize an entire population, the misuse of media as propaganda and the depths of depravity to which humans can fall when fueled by fear and anger — and most troubling, the steady increase in anti-Semitism.

This week is Holocaust Remembrance Week. In addition to lighting candles consider including the testimony of a survivor in how you “never forget.” For example, dig into the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. The interviews reveal ordinary men and women, constrained by circumstances, and the unheroic things they did to stay alive.

"One night I was so hungry," a woman, Hanna F., remembers, "I couldn't sleep…. I stole that piece of bread [from my bunkmate]. I never admitted it. I was very sorry, because I was hungry and she was hungry … but there was no solution [because] you got diarrhea [anyway and] that was the end. So this wasn't good and that wasn't good: So what choice did we have?"

When we can grasp that nightmares are as critical to our understanding of history as bravery and self-sacrifice, we will have made a significant step toward Holocaust remembrance.

The Holocaust is not ancient history. The same poisons of racism and anti-Semitism that led to the mass murder of millions are at work today, just below the surface of American life. The danger of its recurrence in the future can be mitigated, but only if we enhance our understanding of what occurred in the past.

Joshua M. Greene is an opinion writer for the Los Angeles Times. This column was distributed by Tribune News Service.