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The president’s tribute to Jewish heritage featured a pledge against hate that is undermined by his DEI orders and refusal to mention the IHRA definition.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

For those who think what Jews need is more official recognition of their heritage, it was a great afternoon. The White House celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month was a star-studded affair with the president, the first lady and second gentleman Doug Emhoff speaking, and also featured a performance with the stars of the Broadway play “Parade,” a musical about the Leo Frank case.

The point of the show was not just to flatter Jews with an event celebrating their month, thus giving them a slice of the minority entitlement pie. Biden used it to highlight his stand against antisemitism and as a preview of an administration plan scheduled to be released later this month that will reveal a new “national strategy” to deal with the problem.

But the title of the interagency group that is working on the issue says all anyone needs to know about how serious—meaning, not at all—the administration is about fighting antisemitism. Far from coming up with a solution to a rising tide of Jew-hatred in the United States, it’s likely that this administration, more than any of its predecessors, is actually making things worse.

Biden boasted about the White House task force on “antisemitism and Islamophobia” in his remarks at the Jewish Heritage Month, saying it represented a fulfillment of his own commitment to dealing with the problem. The president claims that it was the “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va., in the summer of 2017 that convinced him to run for president. But while his opposition to neo-Nazis is unexceptionable, his decision to link antisemitism with Islamophobia as being two problems of equal weight is telling.

Hatred of Muslims is as repugnant as the hatred of Jews. But the decision to link the two concerns is a function of Democratic Party politics.

Though he campaigned as the moderate, sane alternative to his main primary rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, his administration has conducted itself as if it is in thrall to the Democrats’ intersectional left-wing activist base. And that is why Biden’s task force chose to lump his response to antisemitism in with one about Islamophobia.

That was, at least in part, a response to the efforts of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to get the U.S. State Department to appoint an official to monitor Islamophobia in the same way that it has one to monitor antisemitism, a post that is currently filled by historian Deborah Lipstadt.

An ominous sign

While that request is, like the linking of the two by the White House, a seemingly anodyne gesture that recognizes a common fight against religious intolerance, it’s actually anything but. Of course, there is prejudice against Muslims in this country. But the problem is not just that Omar— a supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement, an inveterate antisemite who has made headlines with her “all about the Benjamins” slur insinuating that Jews buy congressional support for Israel—has no standing to be talking about the subject. Most of what she considers Islamophobia are efforts to monitor and hold accountable radical Muslims who engage in antisemitism and support for Islamist terrorists.

It’s also based on the myth of a post-9/11 backlash against Muslims that continues to be accepted by the corporate media as fact rather than something that is largely unsupported by the data about hate crimes. In the last two decades, FBI statistics have consistently shown that Jews are the primary victims of religious bias, far outstripping those in which prejudice against Muslims is blamed.

But overblown or not, tying the two topics together is an ominous sign that whatever the White House ultimately produces about antisemitism will not be based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of the term. That’s because it mentions the demonization of Israel. And that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. So, if the White House is coming up with a response to Jew-hatred that incorporates the worldview of Omar—and the rest of the congressional squad and fellow progressive Democrats—then it’s unlikely to focus on the growing problem of left-wing antisemitism.

The whole point of Biden’s approach to antisemitism is to see it as solely a function of the threat from the extreme right, seen in Virginia, that so frightened the country with its evocation of the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies, exhibited in the form of a few hundred hatemongers marching with tiki torches.

Opposing neo-Nazis is fine, but doing so takes no courage. Nor does it recognize that however vile and violent these people may be, they have no political support. That is not the case with anti-Zionists who sit in Congress and have an unfortunate amount of clout in Biden’s party and its progressive wing.

Just as important is the fact that far from setting an example of opposing the tropes of left-wing antisemitism, the Biden administration is itself a main supporter of its ideology and core beliefs.

The main source of the left’s delegitimization of Jews is the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as well as critical race theory (CRT) studies. DEI is a toxic force in contemporary America because by substituting the notion of equity—or equal outcomes—for equality, it maintains that equality and equal opportunity is not just attainable but also undesirable. In this way, race is seen as always trumping merit, something that works to destroy the primary method by which Jews gained acceptance in American society.

Along with the CRT belief that everyone must be primarily classified by race and ethnic group, rather than individuals, that sets up a permanent war of those who are labeled as the oppressed, and those who are designated as oppressors and beneficiaries of “white privilege.” And among those who fall into the latter categories are Jews and the State of Israel. In that way, DEI and CRT act not merely to embitter relations between the races but also grant a permission slip for antisemitism.

An administration that was serious about opposing all forms of antisemitism would have nothing to do with the likes of Omar and fellow “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). Instead, they have become welcome guests at the White House and were even singled out recently for compliments by Biden.

It would also oppose efforts to impose DEI on the country. Again, Biden has taken up the cause of the woke catechism and made its promotion one of his chief priorities, forcing every government agency and department to submit its own DEI plan. That will substitute racial quotas for merit, something that always bodes ill for Jews.

It also lends legitimacy to those very forces that are pushing the hardest for BDS discrimination against Israel and its Jewish supporters. Indeed, underneath the push for official recognition of Jewish heritage is a desire to get in on the same intersectional victim racket that left-wing antisemites promote.

The sort of lip service given to the threat of antisemitism at the White House party is to be welcomed. But honoring Jewish heritage means nothing if, at the same time, the Biden administration is enabling and empowering the same forces that are seeking to legitimize left-wing antisemitism.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

The post Joe Biden’s empty words about antisemitism – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.

Released Palestinian prisoner Alaa Al-A’araj, discussing the death of Islamic Jihad terrorist Khader Adnan in Israeli jail, concurs with his own mother, who said that Martyrdom is a “source of pride, but not in this way.”

The post WATCH: Death as a Martyr by hunger strike is ‘a problem,’ says released prisoner appeared first on World Israel News.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle say they were pursued by paparazzi in a ‘near catastrophic’ car chase Tuesday night after an awards ceremony in New York City.

The post WATCH: Harry and Meghan reportedly in ‘near catastrophic’ car chase appeared first on World Israel News.

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Leader of the French Revolution Maximilien Robespierre is often portrayed as a crazed fanatic. It’s thanks to the work of his equally revolutionary sister Charlotte Robespierre that the egalitarian basis of his legacy survived.

To Versailles, an Incident in the French Revolution, (circa 1894), (circa 1902). After a painting in the Museums Sheffield collection. French women wielding scythes and banging drums march on the palace of Versailles. Thousands of women took part in the march on October 5, 1789. [Cassell and Company Ltd, London, circa 1902.] Artist Unknown. (The Print Collector / Getty Images)

In 1789, French society rose up against a corrupt feudal order. Republican fervor on the streets and in the assemblies abolished the monarchy, confiscated the church’s property, and kick-started an ambitious restructuring of constitutional and daily life.

By 1793, the Reign of Terror — the mass arrest and execution of real and imagined counterrevolutionaries — was in full swing. With Jacobin Club leader Maximilien Robespierre at the helm, the Terror ostensibly aimed to shift revolutionary zeal from the unruly streets to the orderly guillotine. Fearful for their heads, a temporary alliance of nervous elites seized an opportunity to overthrow and kill Robespierre and his allies. The so-called Thermidorian Reaction had begun.

From the moment of his execution in 1794, commentators have been relentlessly reshaping Robespierre’s legacy to fit their political purposes, and he remains an ambiguous figure today. He is by turns cast as an anti-totalitarian bogeyman, a totem against aristocratic privilege, a case study in why not to pursue elite corruption too vigorously, or an egalitarian leveler.

Robespierre’s sister Charlotte — who worked at various points as his secretary, a Jacobin emissary to the regions, and a kind of revolutionary wartime agent — took it upon herself to ensure that the egalitarian vision of Robespierre survives to this day. She survived the decades after Thermidor, joined forces with the first communists, and went on to shape future revolutions in Europe.

Fraternité

The Robespierre children — Maximilien, Charlotte, and Augustin — were close in age. As young adults from regional Arras, they lacked the money and social networks that guaranteed success and lived fairly modestly. Maximilien achieved success as a lawyer thanks to his talents and some generous benefactors, though his reputation as a somewhat annoying bleeding heart marked him as an outsider in the elite circles of Arras. Elected to the Estates General in 1789, Robespierre set off for Paris and plunged himself into revolutionary debate, politics, intrigue, and the Jacobin Club.

As the revolution widened its ambitions to destroy the aristocracy, Charlotte became a sort of unofficial Jacobin delegate in Arras. She organized a campaign against Barbe-Thérèse Marchand, a bourgeois newspaper owner in the city. Marchand’s Affiches d’Artois supported exiled aristocrats and clergy; she had also successfully bankrolled the election of a conservative Girondin candidate from Arras serving in the newly formed Legislative Assembly. Charlotte’s campaign culminated in a large rally in 1791 outside Marchand’s home in defense of the revolution. Affiches d’Artois ridiculed the demonstration for including theater ushers and laundrywomen. Less than a year later, Marchand’s delegate in Paris was attacked as a closet royalist by a sansculotte crowd, and Marchand herself fled France.

Buoyed by the success of the revolutionary project, Charlotte moved to Paris. She lived on and off with her brothers, both now elected to the National Convention. She participated in meetings and discussions with some of the most prominent figures of the revolution. These included Joseph Fouché, whose courtship of Charlotte ended when the Robespierres lambasted him for committing bloody and indiscriminate massacres in Lyon. In 1793 she was sent on a mission with her brother Augustin to help suppress a Federalist revolt in Nice. Physically attacked by Girondins and under extreme pressure, Charlotte had a ferocious falling out with Augustin. She ultimately returned to Paris on her own.

In 1794 Robespierre’s enemies orchestrated their coup against him. After fierce fighting, Maximilien and Augustin were executed. Charlotte was beaten by soldiers and arrested. Her female cellmate, who Charlotte later realized was probably a Thermidorian agent, convinced her to sign a document she never read — presumably a denunciation of her brothers. Charlotte was released from prison and sought refuge with her few remaining supporters.

The Black Legend

The next forty years would see a range of regimes in power. But whether France was under the leadership of the Directory, Napoleon Bonaparte, or the Bourbon Restoration, one theme remained constant: Robespierre was a dirty word.

Maximilien was denounced by all and sundry. He became a symbol for all the excesses of the revolution, regardless of his involvement with them. Some of the accusations were true enough — it is undeniable he advocated for the Terror — but others were pure imagination.

More sophisticated character assassinations, such as those by Madame de Staël, accused Robespierre of demagogically rendering himself a conduit for the crazed passions of the mob. But it was far more normal for Robespierre to simply be depicted as an intrinsically cruel, bloodthirsty, and ambitious monster.

There were also allegations of decadence, immorality, and corruption. The Girondin Comtesse de Genlis, whose brother had been executed during the Terror, accused Robespierre of impropriety when interrogating women. Rumors circulated that he had kept King Louis XVI’s daughter imprisoned in Temple Tower with the intention of marrying her. Robespierre’s supposed “royal ambition” was not an entirely new theme. When Charlotte had gone on her mission to Nice, she had been accused by Federalists of riding her horse around the city like a princess.

Charlotte had been there when her brother castigated people like Joseph Fouché and Jean-Paul Marat for their counterproductive, pointless violence. And she had lived with him when a stream of smiling, gift-bearing Girondin assassins — including the teenage Cécile Renault — knocked at their door over a period of months trying to murder him. These same people and factions now sat in power. They performatively wrung their hands at the very thought of violence and blamed Robespierre for many of their own crimes.

Charlotte was in no position to protest this emerging “black legend.” Despite accusations that the Robespierres had royal designs, revolutionary activity hurt the family finances badly. Charlotte, the only survivor, remained destitute and more or less in hiding. Napoleon Bonaparte’s Consulate, and later the Bourbon Restoration, effectively bought her silence by offering her a modest (and gradually diminishing) pension.

In 1830, a widely circulating fake memoir supposedly written by Maximilien Robespierre alleged that her brother had been planning to have Charlotte guillotined. This final humiliation, from a regime headed by the brother of the king she had helped depose, forced her hand.

“They Were Thought to Owe Their Virtue More to Education Than to Nature”

Following the initial Thermidorian Reaction in 1794, the journalist François-Noël Babeuf emerged as leader of the far left of the revolutionary movement. In the context of the Directory’s clumsy attempt to remove price controls on food, Babeuf’s espousal of economic egalitarianism and the abolition of private property grew in popularity. The Directory moved against Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals when regiments of police and soldiers began to join, and executed him in 1797. But Babeuf’s followers, including coconspirator Philippe Buonarroti, continued to develop and propagate his ideas.

By the late Bourbon Restoration, these ideas had well and truly morphed into a proto-communist tendency. In 1828 Buonarroti published History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality. That same year, a young schoolteacher named Albert Laponneraye moved to Paris and was swept up in this school of thought. He was a critical admirer of Robespierre and wrote an article in 1830 condemning the Robespierre memoir forgery.

Charlotte had also written publicly in protest against the forgery and spied her chance. The two connected and engaged in a yearslong fruitful and comradely dialogue on Robespierre and contemporary politics. Charlotte provided Laponneraye with many letters and documents she had hidden from the authorities. In between his own writing and stints in prison for revolutionary activity, Laponneraye published Maximilien’s Oeuvres Choisies as well as Charlotte’s own Memoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères.

Laponneraye clearly respected the intellect and skills of the women around him. His sister, Zoé, was also a writer who later worked with him as a publisher at La Voix du Peuple. It is clear from moments in Zoé’s novella Samarite — a quasi-gothic bildungsroman about a suicidal youth who morphs into a satanic bourgeois — that questioning women’s oppression was a standard feature in the social circles of their readership. Nevertheless, this openness to women’s political participation didn’t totally eradicate backwards ideas about “natural roles.” Laponneraye compared Charlotte favorably to the Girondin Madame Roland, for example, on the basis that la soeur Robespierre did not fancy herself a stateswoman.

Such humility is not overly evident in Charlotte’s own writing however. In her public letter condemning the fake memoir, she analogizes her situation to that of Cornelia, mother of the Ancient Roman Gracchi brothers. In Plutarch’s telling, Cornelia is a cunning participant in the brothers’ rise to power and a behind-the-scenes legislator. French revolutionaries in the 1790s had nicknamed Babeuf “Gracchus” after the brothers; the neo-Babouvists saw the Gracchi brothers as early socialists. Charlotte’s allusion suggests she both saw herself as a kind of stateswoman and was happy to openly associate her name with the emergent communist wing of the revolutionary spirit.

When Charlotte died in 1834, Laponneraye was in prison for writing his seditious Lettres aux Prolétaires. A friend attended and read the eulogy he had written for her.

A Specter in a Shadow

While Charlotte vociferously defended her brother’s personal integrity in her memoir, she is not particularly hagiographic about his political legacy, and asks readers to use their own judgement on the question. Laponneraye’s admiration for Robespierre was similarly circumspect. In his History of the French Revolution (1838), he declares that “those who make half-revolutions dig themselves a grave”:

The Montagnards dug theirs by not breaking the industrial helotism of the worker. . . . How did these prodigious men, who fought with such indomitable energy and audacity against a united Europe, and against the relentless plots of the aristocracy, recoil in horror before a reorganization of work and a reshuffle of property? This was their greatest fault. . . . It is from this serious fault that all the misfortunes that have weighed down on France for half a century have flowed. Perhaps we have the right to show ourselves severe before the Montagnards, for in politics faults are crimes.

The crises that would beset France over the next ten years would culminate in the Europe-wide Revolutions of 1848. A young Karl Marx was in Paris at the time. There was a gulf between his conception of social revolution and the Babouvists’. Yet on the eve of revolution, Marx addressed the Society of the Rights of Man — of which Laponneraye was an affiliate — and skillfully declared, “I want to march in the shadow of the Great Robespierre.”

In her final years Charlotte made a conscious choice to attach her brother’s legacy to the growing specter haunting Europe. Her former suitor-turned-enemy Joseph Fouché veered increasingly right over the period in an effort to save his own skin; he spent his twilight years prosecuting the White Terror as the king’s police minister. By contrast, Charlotte’s is a fine example that, even amid the rising tides of reaction, one can still choose to side with the people.

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Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac collaborated with the fascist regime in Croatia, whose atrocities shocked even the Nazis. The US Congress then spent years attempting to free him in the name of anti-communism.

A woman holding a placard that reads “We demand justice and freedom for Archbishop Stepinac and the Croatian People” at a protest against the incarceration of Croatian archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, United States, circa 1946. (FPG / Archive Photos / Getty Images)

“The times are such that it is no longer the tongue which speaks but the blood with its mysterious links with the country,” Aloysius Stepinac, the archbishop of Zagreb and the head of the Croatian Catholic Church, wrote to his bishops on April 28, 1941. “Who can reproach us if we also, as spiritual pastors, add our contribution to the pride and rejoicing of the people, when full of devotion and warm thanks we turn to Almighty God?”

The occasion for Stepinac’s joy was the creation of the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (NDH), the Independent State of Croatia, installed by the Nazis after their invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia. The NDH regime would soon become infamous for its brutality, even in the eyes of the Nazis themselves. Its persecution of Jews, Roma, and, above all, Orthodox Serbs — for whom the NDH adopted a policy of “convert a third, expel a third, and kill a third” — rivaled the crimes of any fascist regime. The most notorious NDH death camp, Jasenovac, was the third-largest in Europe during the war. More than half a million Serbs, thirty thousand Jews, and sixteen thousand Roma were murdered, while around 250,000 Serbs were expelled and 200,000 forcibly converted to Catholicism. The Waffen-SS, not known for its squeamishness, described the NDH’s atrocities as “bestial.”

The Croatian Catholic Church — led by Stepinac — was deeply entangled with the NDH regime. However, after it was overthrown by the communist partisans in 1945 and Stepinac was imprisoned for treason and wartime collaboration, anti-communists in the United States rebranded him as an innocent and courageous martyr. The US government soon fought for his release and began a wide, long-term campaign across the Western world on behalf of clerical fascism in the Balkans.

Stepinac’s Wartime Record

Neither Stepinac nor his bishops participated directly in NDH atrocities. Indeed, sometimes they objected to them and gave assistance to their victims. Objections, however, came with caveats. In a 1941 unpublished letter to NDH leader Ante Pavelić about the savagery of the forced conversion campaign in Bosnia (which was part of NDH territory), Stepinac argued that the Serbs provoked the genocidal violence that they suffered and that the real problem with mass murder was that it was “letting slip excellent opportunities which we could use for the good of Croatia and the Holy Catholic cause. From a minority we might become a majority in Bosnia and Hercegovina.” When Stepinac later argued, euphemistically, against “unjust behavior” toward Serbs and Jews in his sermons, he did so in fear that such “behavior” would drive people into the arms of the partisans (a concern that was shared by the Waffen-SS).

As Stella Alexander documents in her relatively sympathetic biography of Stepinac, he always saved his unqualified condemnations for communists; he remained polite and deferential toward Pavelić and never broke with the NDH regime; and he maintained, as late as 1944, when he was well aware of the NDH’s worst crimes against Serbs, Jews, and Roma, that the biggest victims of the war were Croats.

Stepinac was an opportunist who saw in fascism a priceless opportunity to secure his long-held desire for an independent Croatia cleansed of “schismatic Serbs.” The best things that can be said for him are that he wasn’t a murderer, he didn’t condone or take pleasure in violence, and he probably behaved no worse than many would under a fascist regime.

Stepinac’s Remaking Into a Martyr of Communist Oppression

Stepinac was detained by the Communist authorities who took over Yugoslavia in 1945. Their leader, Josip Broz Tito, did not want to make a martyr of Stepinac and was willing to let him go free so long as he left the country. Stepinac — encouraged by the Vatican — instead chose to stay in Yugoslavia and stand trial in 1946, after which he was sentenced to sixteen years in prison for treason and collaboration.

Abroad, anti-communists wasted no time in whitewashing Stepinac’s history of fascist collaboration to recast him as a victim a repression. In Ireland, the Count of Thomond, Anthony Henry O’Brien, wrote a short biography of Stepinac in 1947 arguing that he was a Christ-like victim of communist persecution. In the United States, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman, embedded O’Brien’s book in the foundation stone of a new Stepinac Institute and sponsored the creation of the Archbishop Stepinac High School, which still provides secondary education in White Plains, New York.

Spellman and his allies in the US Congress began a campaign for Stepinac’s release. Subtly but forcefully, the State Department and the US embassy in Belgrade gave this campaign concrete support.

Leveraging Congressional Hostility

After Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform in June 1948, American diplomats were reluctant to fight for Stepinac because they were trying to court, rather than antagonize, Tito in order to deepen his break with Joseph Stalin and encourage further disunity in the Eastern Bloc. In February 1949, the US ambassador to Yugoslavia, Cavendish Cannon, warned Secretary of State Dean Acheson that, while “world conscience demands action on behalf [of] Stepinac,” the US government should “choose [the] timing and method” of any campaign for his release carefully in order “to ensure that benefits outweigh probable disadvantages.” Crucially, Cannon advised against linking the Stepinac issue to future aid programs, because this would give the impression to Tito that the United States was trying “to extort political advantages from him” while he was vulnerable and isolated from his former Soviet allies.

Acheson had written to Cannon asking for his opinion on how to respond to a House of Representatives resolution condemning the treatment of Stepinac. The House majority leader, Massachusetts Democrat John McCormack, had personally called Acheson to demand that the resolution be acted upon. While both Acheson and Cannon were initially more circumspect than the House, both the embassy and the State Department soon recognized that congressional hostility toward Yugoslavia could be useful.

In his first conversation with Tito in January 1950, Cannon’s successor as ambassador, George Allen, “took occasion to say, in all frankness, that . . . outright economic aid from US would face serious difficulties” because there was “considerable opposition in US Congress” to “subsidizing” socialistic economic polices abroad. In March and again in June, Acheson instructed Allen to keep reminding Tito that “Congress and public opinion play [an] essential role in US foreign policy” and that “religious liberty” was among their primary concerns with the Yugoslav government.

In November, the Yugoslav ambassador in Washington asked Acheson how Yugoslavia could improve its chances of receiving urgently needed food aid in the aftermath of a disastrous drought. Acheson advised that the continued detention of Stepinac made “it most difficult for many in [the] US, Catholics and non-Catholics, to support aid” to the country.

With Acheson’s cajoling, Congress approved emergency food aid for Yugoslavia in December 1950, but stingily, and only after publicly calling Tito, among other things, “an average, if unusually energetic type, of international thug,” a “declared enemy of everything America stands for,” and “as blackhearted and treacherous a Communist as Stalin himself.” In April 1951, Majority Leader McCormack and the House Speaker, Texas Democrat Sam Rayburn, told Assistant Secretary of State George Perkins that “the time was now ripe for us to proceed actively to try to get some results” on Stepinac. Perkins, in turn, instructed the embassy in Belgrade to tell Yugoslav officials that “we have no assurance that . . . the existence of the Stepinac complication might not make the difference between aid, and no aid for Yugoslavia” in the future.

This message was relayed to Tito himself in July, when George Allen organized a two-hour conference with Tito and Connecticut Democratic senator Brien McMahon. “Speaking frankly,” McMahon “wished to let Tito know that 30 million Catholics in [the] US could not remain indifferent to [the] continued imprisonment of Stepinac.” Tito reminded McMahon that he was willing to let Stepinac free as long as he left Yugoslavia — an offer that Stepinac and the Vatican refused. McMahon said they refused because “acceptance would be admission of guilt.” Tito then said that the “Pope [could] make Stepinac cardinal which [would] certainly not indicate admission of guilt,” before McMahon suggested that Stepinac be released “for residence in [a] monastery inside Yugoslavia.” “Tito said he was ready to grant this,” which, in Allen’s view, represented “distinct progress.”

In November, Allen arranged another meeting between Tito and two members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: Wisconsin Democrat Clement J. Zablocki and New York Democrat Edna F. Kelly, a staunch Tito critic. Allen reported that “Zablocki and Kelly pressed Tito vigorously on question of Stepinac, asking why they had not been allowed to visit him.” In response,

Tito said Stepinac [would] be released within a month and [would] be allowed to act as priest if he wished but [not] as bishop or archbishop. While Zablocki appeared to be satisfied with [this] outcome, Mrs. Kelly told me subsequently she [would] reserve any judgement or statement until she had seen Holy Father in Rome.

Although Allen believed that Tito “wish[ed] to avoid appearance of acting under congressional pressure” in freeing Stepinac, he credited “continual representations by various Congressmen” as “primarily responsible for [his] release,” which was finalized on December 5, 1951.

The Legacy of the Stepinac Myth

The Stepinac campaign was an early and successful example of American apologia for crimes against humanity in the Balkans; but it was far from the last.

The Irish essayist Hubert Butler, one of the few Western commentators who criticized the myth of Stepinac’s martyrdom from the beginning, warned, in 1956, that fervent anti-communism was morphing into apologia for fascism. Butler observed how NDH head Ante Pavelić, who had mysteriously escaped to Argentina via British-occupied Austria and Rome after the war, had “cashed in very effectively on the Stepinac legend,” transforming his own image in the West from “a monster of iniquity” into something “more respectable, and if he was wanted again in a campaign against Communism in the Balkans it is possible that he and his friends would be used.”

Indeed, NDH revivalists — calling themselves “Ustaše,” in honor of the original organization founded by Pavelić in 1929 — soon began just such a campaign from Australia, where, beginning in 1963, “they established new Ustaša networks which trained new members, financed chapters overseas, launched incursions into Yugoslavia, and waged a terrorism campaign against the Yugoslav migrant community in Australia.” The Australian intelligence services knew about these activities but ignored them because the Ustaše were “good anti-Communists.”

In the United States, members of Congress, emboldened by the successful Stepinac campaign, went on to argue against the extradition to Yugoslavia of the NDH’s former interior minister Andrija Artuković, despite his central role in orchestrating the regime’s genocidal policies. In June 1958, Michigan Republican congressman Victor A. Knox described Artuković as “an exemplary Catholic and a Knight of Columbus, with a Catholic wife and five children,” “one of the most brilliant and patriotic Yugoslavs living,” and someone who “knows so much about Titoism and the horrible massacres and other outrages perpetrated by Tito and his crowd.” For these reasons, “Tito wants to get his hands on Artuković and silence him.” In 1955 and 1958, California Republican congressman James B. Utt introduced bills attempting to give Artuković American citizenship. After a protracted legal battle, Artuković was finally extradited to Yugoslavia in 1986.

When the Cold War ended, and the United States no longer had a strategic interest in Yugoslavia’s survival, the US and Germany supported the secessionist aspirations of the Croatian president Franjo Tuđman, well-known for his “Ustaša nostalgia.” President Tuđman, a revisionist historian of the NDH regime, had described the NDH as “an expression of the historic aspirations of the Croatian people.” Tuđman was not in the same league as Pavelić, but his government ultimately achieved what Pavelić could only dream of: the complete ethnic cleansing of Croatia, when it expelled two hundred thousand Serbs from the Krajina region in August 1995. US president Bill Clinton welcomed this news.

The wider Stepinac myth endures today. The man who welcomed a Nazi-installed government as a gift from God was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1998. Stepinac, the pope proclaimed, was “one of the outstanding figures of the Catholic Church, having endured in his own body and his own spirit the atrocities of the Communist system.” In 2016, a Zagreb court annulled Stepinac’s 1946 convictions for treason and collaboration. And in March this year, the European Parliament hosted an event honoring Stepinac’s legacy of “Faith, Perseverance, and Hope.”

The more diplomatic and sensitive Pope Francis has so far resisted calls for Stepinac to be made a saint. Perhaps worse people have been made saints; certainly, worse people have supported fascist governments. But given the number of truly extraordinary people who suffered so much at the hands of fascism in Yugoslavia, real martyrs and real saints shouldn’t be hard to find.

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House Foreign Affairs Committee votes unanimously to create permanent envoy position, aimed at expanding Abraham Accords and strengthening ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

By Andrew Bernard, The Algemeiner

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved a bill to create a permanent envoy tasked with strengthening and expanding the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries in 2020.

Introduced by Representatives Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Mike Lawler (R-NY), the bipartisan bill garnered strong support from the committee’s members, two of whom cited the potential for Saudi Arabia to join the accords.

“I think that having a special envoy is a critical step in trying to get Saudi Arabia as part of the Abraham Accords,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL). “There’s no doubt that that would be a critical step for the region. I think the Abraham Accords has shown that shared economic interest is the pathway to not just peace in the region, but also bringing down antisemitism.”

The legislation, which was first introduced in February, would create a Special Envoy for the Abraham Accords with the rank of ambassador who would be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The envoy would “serve as the primary advisor to, and coordinate efforts across, the United States Government relating to expanding and strengthening the Abraham Accords” and “engage in discussions with nation-state officials lacking official diplomatic relations with Israel.”

The Abraham Accords, which were negotiated by the Trump administration, initially established relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and were later joined by Morocco. Sudan’s steps towards normalization with Israel as part of the accords framework was halted when Sudan’s government was toppled by a military coup in October 2021.

As one of the wealthiest and most populous Arab states and as one of Israel’s former greatest antagonists, Saudi Arabia has long been viewed as the crown jewel of Arab-Israeli normalization by US and Israeli officials.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly made a secret trip to the kingdom in November 2020, and has explicitly cited expanding the accords to include Saudi Arabia as a goal in readouts of his discussions with the Biden Administration.

Saudi Arabia, however, continues to publicly insist that it is committed to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in which they offered full normalization between the Arab world and Israel in exchange for Israel withdrawing from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan Heights and recognizing a Palestinian state.

During the hearing, Representatives also welcomed reports that former US Ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration Daniel Shapiro is being considered by Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the role.

“I can think of no better person than the one being considered, Dan Shapiro,” said Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL). “[He] understands the challenges but also fully embraces and appreciates the opportunities to work at there.”

The creation of the envoy roll comes as current US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides is expected to leave his posting in the coming months and as the Biden administration has attempted to navigate turmoil in the relationships for the US both with Israel and with the Gulf Arab states. In March, Israeli politicians criticized Biden for having “crossed a red line” when Biden said that Israel “cannot continue down this road” of proposed judicial reforms that sparked months of protests.

After passage in the Foreign Affairs Committee, the legislation will now need to be voted on by the full House of Representatives and the Senate before it can be signed by President Biden.

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