Bush Said What?
JERUSALEM – President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel’s Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial’s chairman said.
Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial calling it a “sobering reminder” that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith.
Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.
At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.
The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort, a decision that became the subject of intense controversy years later.
“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.
Shalev presented Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.
The thought of bombing these horrific sites has me wondering, the thought of killing the same people all at once as opposed to allowing them to be killed later has my mind reeling. When did the allies actually know? History reflects the consequences of all wartime decisions. Bombing the death camps would have been an option before they became operational, but bombing them when they were full of people would have just as controversial. I would have considered rescue before destruction. Sometimes, I don’t think Bush thinks things through before he opens his mouth. Well, history shows this is part of his legacy …
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January 11th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Bush said WHAT????
January 12th, 2008 at 1:54 am
‘Battles for survival’ lead to strategic decisions politically suicidal to openly acknowledge. The public certainly didn’t know for quite a while.
Oddly, I’m not sure the “Holocaust Denial” legislation makes much sense : certainly when thought of alongside ongoing lack of coverage of say, the situation in Gaza, or aerial attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan,…
January 12th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Thanks Opit, right on. Sad to see how selective Americans are when acknowledging massacres and genocide, especially when we are complicit. Denial kills people, too. US was not inspired to acknowledge the plight of the Jews because the timing was all wrong … ? The excuses are endless. Its great for this country to stand so righteous so long after the fact. Don’t you think its safer that way?
January 28th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Sorry I took so long. I’ve been away and mail didn’t have a high priority.
History Channel had this question on today : part of the saturation campaign of American war epics. Anyway, it was represented that tactically it was not within technological abilities : a decision reluctantly arrived at after days of discussion. The reasoning involved lack of accuracy. A subsequent accidental bombing made no aprrceiable difference to conditions.