Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on April 18, 2022

In his book, Churchill: Walking With Destiny, Andrew Roberts quotes Winston Churchill in 1945, after the war had ended, as saying, From what Ive seen of our Russian friends, there is nothing I saw that they admire as much as strength and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness. Churchill urged the U.S. and Britain to join in a fraternal association to defend freedom, not only for us and not only for our time, but for a century to come.

Throughout his amazing life, Churchill made some terrible errors in judgment. But he was right about Germanys Adolf Hitler and he was right about the Soviet Unions communist dictator and mass murderer, Joseph Stalin.

Todays Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, is a product of the KGB. The Soviet Unions security agency began a year after Stalins death in 1953, a successor of the dreaded Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKGB and NKVD, who dispatched millions of innocent Soviet citizens to their deaths or banished them to inhumane existence in Siberian gulags.

Since Russia began its war in Ukraine on Feb. 24, more than 10 million Ukrainians reportedly have fled their homes, including more than 4 million who are refugees. Among them, more than 2 million of those displaced are children. The United Nations estimates at least 1,000 civilians have been killed and more than 1,700 wounded as the Russian military pulverizes towns.

As gruesome images from Ukrainian cities make their way around the world such as those of bodies in Bucha or that of a pregnant woman being carried out on a stretcher from a maternity hospital (she and her unborn child reportedly did not survive) President Biden and others have called for holding Putin accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Could it happen? We would have wanted to ask our namesake, Simon Wiesenthal, a man who barely survived the Nazi Holocaust, who, together with his wife, Celia, lost 89 members of their family in the Shoah.

Wiesenthal and a few other survivors of Nazi Germanys Final Solution sought to arrest and try Nazi war criminals who fulfilled Hitlers vision of a Europe Judenrein that is, free of Jews. He sought to restore the basic foundations of justice that Nazism all but obliterated. Wiesenthal wanted accountable, convicted criminals, not martyrs for extremist causes.

Wiesenthal watched in horror as the post-World War II Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal turned out to be not the beginning of Nazi war crimes trials, but the end. Yet he never left the battlefield and helped to bring another 1,100 Nazis to justice.

Wiesenthal died in 2005. Were he alive today, we believe he would make four points regarding Russias brutalities in Ukraine:

Buchachs current inhabitants know what befell their fellow citizens at the hands of Putins forces around 510 kilometers to the east in Bucha. They know that if Ukraine ultimately falls, if the international community fails to act, such a calamity could befall them.

With other tyrants watching how the international community responds to Putins atrocities chief among them, Chinas President Xi Jinping, Irans Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and North Koreas Kim Jong Un the price we would all pay if we allow Putin to get away with his crimes would be devastating.

As the unelected ambassador for 6 million Jewish ghosts, Wiesenthal declared that trials of those who are accused of crimes against humanity must serve as a warning to anyone who contemplates similar acts that they, too, will be held accountable.

Will Putin stand trial? We dont know, but the echoes of history are warning the world: The price of inaction will be catastrophic and global in scope.

Rabbi Marvin Hier is founder and CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the Centers associate dean and global social action director.

See the rest here:

Try Putin? What Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal would advise the world - The Hill

Category: Shoah
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