Bernie Sanders shakes hands with a supporter. Does he have any idea what he's talking about?
I read todaythat Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said during the last Democratic Party debate in Michigan that part of his father's family was “wiped out” in the so-called “Holocaust.” The thought immediately came to me that part of my mother's family was wiped out financially in the Jewish “Wall Street holocaust” called the Great Depression of the 1930s – which, by the way, helped to create world conditions that set the groundwork for the war in Europe that negatively affected Bernie's family and cost the lives of 50 million people … as he said elsewhere. If I were equally as famous as Bernie and mentioned my family's misfortune, people would only be outraged by my impertinence in using the J-word, while Bernie is given bonus points for using the H-word for his family's misfortune.
Just a thought, but could that have had anything to do with his surprise upset victory Tuesday in Michigan?
These are the exact words from Sanders (who is considered radical and extremist by many) that have been quoted approvingly in numerous television newscasts and print news stories across the Internet:
"I am very proud to be Jewish, and being Jewish is an essential part of what I am. Look, my father's family was wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust. I know about what crazy and radical and extremist politics mean."
Bernie's Wikipedia page also reports the story that many of his father's relatives who remained in Poland were "killed in the Holocaust"– devoid of any details, of course.
As a presidential candidate, Sanders should be required to produce the letters from family members in Poland or other documents informing his father of these deaths. If he cannot produce any evidence to show these were “Holocaust” deaths caused by Hitler, he should not claim they were. I submit it's probably hearsay or assumption – if not outright fabrication. With all the fact-checking the Press does, they should fact-check this. The problem, even if they were willing to (which they're not), is that they would not know where to look. Nor does anyone, including Sanders I would bet.
Sanders went on to tell an anecdote: as a child going shopping with his mother he remembers “seeing people working in stores with numbers on their arms because they were in Hitler's concentration camp.”
Bernie Sanders was born in 1941 in Brooklyn so by age 5 there could have been some Jewish refugees living there. But it raises the question: If these were authentic tattoos, why is Auschwitz (the only camp that tattooed prisoners) called a “Death Camp” and “Extermination Camp” when not a single named individual has ever been proven to have been exterminated there, and so many alumni popped up in New York City and Palestine afterward? I don't think Sanders has ever given any thought to this.
Bernie's father was a Polish Jewish immigrant from Galicia who arrived in the USA on his own at the age of 17 and took a very un-Jewish name: Sanders. Bernie's mother, Dorothy Glassberg, was born in New York City to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland and Russia. So Bernie carries the seeds of Polish-Russian Jewry, those Jews who are best known as the malcontents and revolutionary plotters against the bourgeois European order.
Bernie is an ideologue, not a scholar. He has no interest in finding historical truth but in what best serves his political aims. He is quoted in a number of places as saying his interest in politics started early because:
"A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932. He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including 6 million Jews. So what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important."
Bad history, Bernie! Fifty million people died because of a single election? Adolf Hitler won that election in 1932? Six million Jews died? At least he admits he's still repeating what he learned “as a little kid.” Based on this, I see Bernie Sanders as an even worse choice than Hillary Clinton! The first Jewish president vs the first woman president – Yikes! Thank God for Donald Trump – he is the one who will save us from these two "firsts" because he is more capable of winning the general election than are his dwindling number of primary opponents.