I've refrained from posting anything about this story until now because I was skeptical of its veracity at first. The story has since whirled all day around the blogosphere, at least the part that won't ignore anti-Semitism from the left, and it looks like it's sadly true.This morning, It Shines For All, the New York Sun newspaper's blog, reported that, in 1987, Jimmy Carter interceded on behalf of a Nazi SS guard whom the United States was about to deport. The deportee, Martin Bartesch, had admitted to the Justice Department that he had not only served in the SS Death Squad but had volunteered for duty. There was also documented corroboration that Bartesch murdered innocent Jews in the Mauthausen death camp.
After the deportation, Carter received a letter from Bartesch's family complaining about the inhumanity of the former Nazi having to leave his family and adopted country. Carter forwarded the letter to the Justice Department with his own handwritten note asking for "'special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons." The letter, with the Sun's logo imprinted well after the fact, is here:
The family had approached various members of Congress and other dignitaries asking for assistance. All refrained from helping once they learned from the Justice Department the reasons for Bartesch's deportation. Calls to the Carter Center for an explanation or denial have gone unanswered. The mainstream media isn't giving this story much coverage yet, and I'm not holding my breath that they will, but this is a story that should not go unnoticed. Carter has shown once and again his disdain for the Jewish people. This most recent revelation is nearly twenty years old yet it speaks volumes about the person that Jimmy Carter is. He advocated for the freedom of an admitted Nazi killer, someone who willingly and actively participated in the Holocaust, merely because it would affect the murderer's family. Some might excuse Carter's intercession for Bartesch as stemming from naivete and sympathy. It doesn't wash. The letter to Carter very clearly indicated that Bartesch was on the "Nazi Watch List." Only a total and conscious disregard for the atrocity that was the Holocaust can explain Carter's failure to preform some due diligence before giving Bartesch's family priority over justice.
2 comments:
Without defending Carter's action (they are indefensible), I can point out that a rather prominent Republican family made its money off of war profiteering during WWII. More specifically, the grandfather of our present President, and the father of a former Preisdent, assisted the Nazi party in various financial dealings.
If your allegations have documentation, I would like to see them. Even if they do though, it's neither here nor there. Since when do we hold someone accountable for the actions, whether they are illegal or just immoral, of their ancestors? To put it another way, if a person in present time committed such a serious crime or moral offense, I would obviously not support him or her. On the other hand, I would not hold against that person the deeds of an ancestor. I support or oppose people on their own merits, not on those of others, especially those they cannot control.
For example, I dislike Ted Kennedy not because his father was an anti-Semitic bootlegger who allied with Senator McCarthy but for the current senior senator from Massachusetts' own politics. Of course, Mary Jo Kopchene's family has other reasons to dislike Ted Kennedy.
You may be thinking what Ted Kennedy has to do with all this. He doesn't but neither does Bush 41 or W.
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