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Monday, December 13, 2010

Shocking Nixon-Kissinger Tapes: ‘So What If Soviets Gas Jews’

White House adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once told President Richard Nixon, "...And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern,” according to newly-released tapes from the Nixon library.

 The shocking statement from Kissinger, a Jew, was followed up by an agreement from Nixon, who said,  "I know. We can't blow up the world because of it."

Kissinger also advised Nixon when he was president during the campaign to free the Jews from the Soviet Union, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy.

The shocking statements contradict an image among some American Jews that Nixon was a friend of Israel and the Jews.

Nixon also is quoted as saying an anti-Semitic generalization, “What it is, is it's the insecurity. It’s the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that's why they have to prove things."

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a usually constant critic of Israel, responded on his blog, "I suppose he [Nixon] is right, at least on the narrow subject of Henry Kissinger.”

The conversations that were recorded on secret tapes followed a March 1973 meeting between Nixon and Kissinger with former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who pleaded with the United States to help open the barred gates for millions of oppressed Soviet Jews, denied religious freedom,  wanting to flee the Communist regime. Eventually, the freedom for Soviet Jews campaign broke the ban in later administrations and allowed massive immigration of Jews to Israel as well as to the United States.                              

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