Steve Bannon to Address Zionist Organization of America Gala

Stephen K. Bannon, Breitbart News executive chairman and former White House chief strategist, will speak at the Zionist Organization of America’s (ZOA) annual gala Sunday.

“We were excited to bring Steve Bannon to the ZOA Gala,” ZOA President Morton Klein tells Breitbart News. “A well-known top-level Israeli official told me, ‘You know from the outside that Bannon is a friend of Israel.’ I can tell you, as an insider, that he is the greatest friend of Israel imaginable.”

ZOA is the oldest Zionist organization in America — instrumental in the crafting of the State of Israel, and, today, ZOA has remained one of Israel’s most steadfast defenders in American politics.

I once heard Andrew Breitbart speech about the corruption of the American media and what had to be done about it. I didn’t know anything much about him except that he was one feisty conservative fighter. I later learned, after he died, that he was Jewish.

I seriously doubt that he would have had Bannon as one of his top people in his organization if he were anti-Semitic. If Mort Klein can vouch for Bannon, I’m glad. Klein has more gutsy Jewish balls than the whole Reform Movement in America, and he has never shirked from a fight against Jewish enemies and America’s enemies.

I’d like to be a fly on a matzoh ball when Bannon speaks. No Kvetching, kvelling, no mishigash, no fooling around. I expect a speech that will in intensity, match that of the burning bush Moses encountered in the desert - just as bright, intense and serious.

Some of us Jews weren’t raised in “The Stupid Patch”. Unfortunately my relatives in Austria/Ukraine “The Pale” during the late 30’s and early 40’s were too trusting of the Germans and Ukrainian fascists or too stupid to leave when things started getting really bad.

Their bodies are probably in the execution sandpits on the outskirts of Lvov/Lviv/Lemberg or in the ashes at Belzec and Auschwitz concentration camps.

As for me, I’ll take Kahane’s “Never Again” over the liberals “Wait and See”. That applies to Israel and Iran/Hebollah/Hamas/Fatah as well as to the US and North Korea and Iran.

The book “Strike Zion” applies to all freedom-loving peoples as a warning NOT TO WAIT until the enemy attacks you because they might get lucky and you’ll be dead.

MM- Vietnam/Cambodia journalist 1970.

I agree with most of what you’ve written, but you should do more homework about the reality of the impossible situation of the Jews in the Ukraine/Pale of Settlement. They didn’t have the opportunity to leave, as did the Germans in the early 1930s. They were stuck, stuck, stuck. The Jewish homeland was blocked by the ever so civil Brits. U.S. closed its doors to almost all immigration about 1924. Ditto for other Western countries. You owe your relatives who were slaughtered in Eastern Europe an apology for smugly claiming that they were too short-sighted to pick up and leave. Just because one part of your family came to the U.S. when it was easy to come many decades earlier doesn’t mean those who didn’t come at that time were stupid. Hindsight is 50/50.

The ZOA is only of the few organizations that stays the course in its correct assessment of what’s going on about Israel. ZOA was the one just a few organizations to track the violations of the Oslo Accords by the Arabs, who did not one thing they’d signed on the dotted line that they would do. Meanwhile Israel abided by every single promise. The press ignored the facts.

“Progressive” Jewish organizations, including AIPAC, drank the koolaid and they were completely naive and not acting in Israel’s best interest with their kumbayah. ZOA distinguished itself in reporting what was and what was not occurring, reporting the continual violence and the continuing incitement to violence and the teaching of hate. It’s because Bannon knows what’s real and says it that the Left are trying so very hard through false accusation and lies to discredit him, as they try to do with all who speak the truth clearly so that all can understand.

My grandmother’s brothers and sisters go letters from her until they disappeared about 1940 or 41. My grandmother’s husband was from Vienna. Any of his relatives there had to have known what was going on because they were experiencing it. I don’t know if he had constant communications with them or not. We have nothing left from little estate.

However, the Pale was an intersection of commerce and communications, so some information had to have come out as to the conditions there.

My late friend was in Vienna when the Germans came in, and he endured a lot of beatings at the hands of the Gestapo. He knew he had to get out and eventually did but lost his sister to a tragic accident of fate. He gave her his boat ticket to America but the boat got trapped in Yugoslavia and the Jewish passengers were executed.

Bill got out thru the US Consulate in Marseilles just before the final wall came down.

Anti-Semitism in both Austria and Lemberg/Ukraine/Poland was well known but it hadn’t risen to the level of genocide until the Nazis came in.

The other tragedy is that the Soviet Union refused to take in Jewish refugees, esp. those from eastern Poland where my friend’s fellow citizens of Chelm were turned back at the Soviet border and many were later killed in German “Aztions”.

Read some of the comments of European Jewish leaders to their fellow Jews about not panicking and fleeing the rise of Hitler. That is what created a false face on what was descending.

“My grandmother’s brothers and sisters go letters from her until they disappeared about 1940 or 41. My grandmother’s husband was from Vienna. Any of his relatives there had to have known what was going on because they were experiencing it. I don’t know if he had constant communications with them or not. We have nothing left from little estate.

However, the Pale was an intersection of commerce and communications, so some information had to have come out as to the conditions there.

Bill got out thru the US Consulate in Marseilles just before the final wall came down.

Anti-Semitism in both Austria and Lemberg/Ukraine/Poland was well known but it hadn’t risen to the level of genocide until the Nazis came in.

Read some of the comments of European Jewish leaders to their fellow Jews about not panicking and fleeing the rise of Hitler. That is what created a false face on what was descending.”

To MadMax - All of what you say is true, but the part that is missing in your ex post facto condemnation of the Jewish and other leaders was that precious few could have had the awesome third eye it would have taken to foretell the kind and scope of horrors that could await them. The Nazi propaganda machine put up facades at every turn. Should Jewish and European history have better informed them. Yes, but still not to imagine an entire army of military recruits, officers, and an army of adventuresome and soon blood-thirsty women as the logistical arm of the mass slaughters over such a hugely wide area. Did Jews try to escape? YES! Did some succeed? YES. Did they hide in self-make pretend graves in the forests, a new one in a different place every night on a constant run for years? YES!

Once they realized from secret oral testimonies of escapees and rumors that were trickling back what likely awaited them and managed to escape the mass slaughters that descending overnight on their towns, a few escaped both the mass graves of their towns and concentration camps and a subset survived in hiding and/or on the run, sometimes with the help of neighbors and others who knew the difference between right and wrong and hid some for a day, a week, or intermittently.

Yes, by 1940 and 1941, it had become almost impossible for Germans to leave. Many in the Pale who knew that Nazis had taken over in Austria and Germany, believed that these Germans would not harm them and that they would be like the Germans they knew from WWI. Even if the Jews of the Pale concluded that systematic murder of Jews was the goal, where could they have gone other than hiding?

Our family likewise lost to Nazi evil just about everyone in all generations of a big family that lived not far from Lemberg and other places.

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