In the wake of the tragic shooting last week in Colorado, Phil Orenstein, who writes often for Frontpage Magazine, has written a piece that ties together several current issues, one of which is the effort to erect a statue of Raoul Wallenberg on several American university campuses.
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Raoul Wallenberg’s Legacy for America
"Last Friday’s Colorado movie massacre was a tragedy and the worst mass shooting in US history. It’s still in the news. Every commentator and so-called social science expert has a theory and root cause analysis. Worst of all, people are politicizing the issue. New York Mayor Bloomberg, along with his call for banning super-sized sugary drinks, salt, trans fats, cigarettes, baby formula and Orthodox circumcisions, is getting up on his soap box for stricter gun control. Every cockroach is coming out of the woodwork. Nassau County Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, who never speaks in public, is also suddenly grandstanding gun control, her one-issue agenda. Liberal commentators are blaming everyone from Bush for overturning the assault weapons ban and the Colorado Tea Party as the cause of the shooting. But all this grandstanding is just deflecting us from the real issues. The real issues affecting America that no one wants to talk about are what we are going to talk about here. It’s a message of hope and strength for the Tea Party and for freedom loving people everywhere.
I am involved in a community project in Queens, New York, to place a statue of Raoul Wallenberg, one of the foremost heroes of WWII, at the Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College. The message of his life and legacy is particularly germane to the Tea Party which is all about individual initiative, constitutionally limited government and free enterprise. Raoul Wallenberg epitomizes individual initiative, freedom and the sanctity of the individual against the all-powerful state.
Comfortable in his affluent Swedish homeland, while nearly everyone was steeped a culture of denial and submission, Wallenberg was alarmed and stood up fearlessly taking action during WWII when millions of Jews were being rounded up and sent to be slaughtered in the Nazi death camps. Jews were considered traitors and sub-human parasites in Hitler’s Germany and civilized people in German and European high society turned away from the horrors of the concentration camps believing it can’t be happening here.
Jews were well off and no one wanted to believe that millions of European Jews were being massacred right next door. Life was comfortable outside the war zone in Wallenberg’s homeland of Sweden and good people believed they were insignificant and powerless in the face of Hitler’s mighty authoritarian state. But Wallenberg, a righteous Christian stood up alone against all odds and became a heroic figure in the fight of good against hatred and evil saving 100,000 Hungarian Jews from extermination toward the end of WWII. He stood eyeball to eyeball with Nazi colonel Adolf Eichmann in Hungary, who was charged with rounding up all the Hungarian Jewish men women and children, the remaining large group of Jews left alive in Europe in the last days of WWII, and deporting them to the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps in neighboring Poland for slaughter. He bluntly told Eichmann you cannot kill the Jews and that he, Raoul Wallenberg would stop him. He did so with the spirit of his fierce determination and diplomacy and the bold strategy of issuing 1000’s of protective Swedish passports to Hungarian Jews. He was the hero that appeared in times of great danger to win the battle against great evil. We will be erecting the statue at Queensborough Community College, the first Wallenberg statue on a U.S. college campus, to model his life as an example for our youth and all good people to follow today.
Fast forward to the present. Today we are beaten down by the growing power of the state. We live in a communist state in the USA run by the elites. Communism, Nazism, Fascism, Islamism are all the same. It’s all about big government control by an authoritarian party. They all function to eradicate the people’s freedom of speech, thought, property, guns and money and place total power in the hands of the minority elites, destroying the middle class in the process, leaving just the peasants and the elites.
Obama’s first term is the tip of the iceberg. Today our conditions are very much like pre-war Nazi Germany when Hitler rose to power, was appointed chancellor and started nationalizing the banks, auto industry and healthcare and then seized absolute power.
Similarly Obama took control of the auto industry, the banks and nationalized healthcare. The state now controls the schools, the press, our cultural institutions, our healthcare and large sectors of the economy. Our freedoms are being taken away. Soon the internet will be a tool of the government and free enterprise will no longer be free. They will soon have our property, our money through undue taxation, our guns and our cradle to grave welfare. Government is the biggest criminal element in the world. The government is stealing your money, not the rich, not Bain Capital, not the banks.
Obama is the master of manipulating the system for power. Nine million people are now on the Social Security disability rolls. It has increased five million since Obama took office. People are gaming the system with back problems, depression and anxiety so they can collect lifetime disability payments, encouraged by the Obama administration, since it takes millions of people off the unemployment statistics who are not counted as unemployed. This keeps the unemployment numbers down, a key economic indicator for the coming presidential election. Likewise, 46 million people are on food stamps. Food stamp commercials are on TV for the first time in U.S. history. They act as Obama’s taxpayer funded campaign commercials, since people getting government handouts will vote to have them continue. National security secrets were leaked by the White House putting the lives of our field agents in jeopardy in order to boost Obama’s national security resume.
Frank Marshall Davis, a card carrying member of the Communist party was Obama’s mentor. Obama and his circle of elites understand the works of Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. They understand the workings of power in order to seize control. This is the darkest period in our country and evil people are disguised as do-gooders, calling for hope and change while demonizing the rich. Hitler and Stalin appeared as the good ones sounding the call of hope and change for the common people. They vilified one group, the Jews, the wealthy capitalists, as the cause of the nation’s problems and obliterated the middle class. The same thing that happened in Nazi Germany can happen here.
That’s why it’s imperative that we study the heroic life and legacy of Raoul Wallenberg. People back then, as is the case now, gave up their rights for comfort and security. People look the other way and don’t want to be bothered. Like Nazi Germany, when their neighbors were being rounded up and taken away to the death camps, people thought to themselves, “glad it’s not me.” People are the same today. They don’t want to be involved. They believe that politics is crooked and government is corrupt, and they are right.
But we are members of the Tea Party and patriots who love freedom and independence. Our epiphanies came when we got up off the couch and stopped yelling at the TV. Our job now is to become more active than ever before for the sake of America. It is our job to fight against the crushing power of the government that has robbed the people of their spirit. We need awaken our friends, co-workers, family and neighbors – our fellow Americans who have given up any real hope for their future and their children’s future, and save our country, just as Raoul Wallenberg saved the lives of 100,000 Jewish men women and children.
There is a Jewish proverb that says there are 36 truly righteous people of courage who emerge during the darkest times for the world to continue. They come forward and use their powers to defeat evil people. As soon as the battle is over they disappear. As soon as WWII was over, Raoul Wallenberg was detained as a spy by the Russians who captured Hungary, disappearing in the Soviet Union and to this day no one knows his fate.
Around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and after Hungary’s liberation from Soviet authoritarian rule, a monument to Wallenberg was dedicated in Budapest and the Hungarian Raoul Wallenberg Association was formed. The American Raoul Wallenberg Scholarship committee held a human rights symposium and a freedom march through the streets of Budapest. It is with this same objective that we venture to install a statue of Raoul Wallenberg at the Holocaust Center at Queensborough Community College, the only Holocaust Resource Center on a College campus to give our kids the greatest lesson of life. It’s a lesson of courage, fearlessness, honor, commitment, duty, the importance of character and the battle of liberty against tyranny and good versus evil. It’s a lesson in understanding our history, understanding the present times and never repeating our past mistakes. It is a clarion call for all who cherish their freedoms to heed the well known words of Edmund Burke: “All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."
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In my view, Orenstein raises what I think is an important thought. The Tea Party began as a movement to protest the growth and encroachment into our lives and pocketbooks by the federal government. To those who think it is in decline, I disagree. The recent recall election in Wisconsin and the primary victory of Republican Ted Cruz for the Texas Senatorial race show that the Tea Party is still a force-and will be in November. I would like to see the Tea Party movement pay more attention to some of the existential threats we face today. I am referring to Islamic terror and the rise in anti-Semitism.
You might question the connection between Raoul Wallenberg and the Tea Party as well as the issues I just mentioned. The effort to get a statue erected on college campuses is a noble effort to bring a reminder of humanity to our campuses and help educate our youth as to what happened during World War II and the Holocaust. In Wallenberg, we have a man who gave up his life to rescue tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the clutches of the Nazis. Today, all too often, Jewish students are being subjected to a climate of intimidation and hate on campus-particularly if they defend the state of Israel against an onslaught of organized protests by students, off-campus activists, and even professors in the classroom. In Europe, Jews cannot even walk the streets of large cities wearing Jewish garb lest they be insulted, spat upon, or physically assaulted. The European authorities, most notably in Malmo, Sweden-the very country that produced Raoul Wallenberg, turn a blind eye because they don't want to offend-or inflame the Muslim immigrant youth, who are the prime perpetrators.
So I welcome Mr Orenstein's effort to bring these various issues together and get the Tea Party involved-not to bash innocent American Muslims, rather to point out to the public that anti-Semitism-the same hate that led to the Holocaust- is on the march again. It is time more Americans learned about figures like Raoul Wallenberg.
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