FDR to Stalin: “I Would Give Saudi King 6 Million Jews”

By Daniel Greenfield

Ibn Saud told FDR;

    What Ibn Saud told him was that the Arab world would never accept a Jewish state of any size in the Holy Land. Saud also “objected violently” to proposals to create a temporary haven in Libya for Jews fleeing the Nazis.

This isn’t really new, but some of the most interesting material comes from Rafael Medoff’s demonstration of how the material was buried and misreported by historians sympathetic to liberal presidents.

When FDR endorsed quotas for Jews in the US and even North Africa, liberal historians claimed that he was being “practical” or actually trying to help Jews. And then there’s the story of the efforts to bury and lie about FDR’s exchange with Stalin about the Jews.

The first inkling that FDR’s private attitude toward Jews was less than amiable came during the mid-1950s debate over the publication of the transcripts of Roosevelt’s February 1945 conference with Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill at Yalta. In 1953, Republican senators began pressing for publication of the full transcripts of the conference.

The State Department opposed publishing the records, on the grounds that they contained sensitive information that might be harmful to the United States or its allies. Eventually, in March 1955, the Yalta transcripts were released as part of the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Two passages that appeared in the original Yalta minutes were deleted from the published version. One had to do with a conversation between American and Soviet military commanders. The other pertained to an exchange between FDR and Stalin concerning Jews.

Had the State Department simply left in the passage about Jews, it might have attracted less notice. Instead, the obvious omission intrigued observers. The New York Times reported that Roosevelt and Stalin discussed Soviet Jewry, Zionism, and the Soviet attempt to establish a Jewish “homeland” in the Siberian region of Birobidzhan.

The Times correspondent then added: “It is not entirely clear from the text why Stalin began talking about the Jewish problem. A line of asterisks preceding Stalin’s statement seems to raise the possibility that one of Stalin’s high-level colleagues may have initiated the discussion of Jews with a statement that has been censored from the published text.”

As it would turn out, it was a statement by Roosevelt, not one of Stalin’s aides, that had been censored.

The mystery deepened two days later, when the Washington Post published an editorial criticizing the deletions as “pernicious” and an attempt to “doctor history.” It noted that among the deletions were “some remarks by President Roosevelt about the Jews,” although it did not spell them out. “In historical perspective, President Roosevelt will have to be judged as a whole man, indiscretions and all,” the Post argued.

Three days later, the text of FDR’s censored statement was published, by U.S. News and World Report. It reported that when Roosevelt mentioned he would soon be seeing Saudi Arabian leader Ibn Saud, Stalin asked if he intended to make any concessions to the king; “The President replied that there was only one concession he thought he might offer and that was to give him the six million Jews in the United States.”

It didn’t end there, because media figures began lying about the quote and when they couldn’t do that anymore, they claimed that FDR had been using anti-semitism as an icebreaker.

FDR did have quite a bond with Ibn Saud.

Roosevelt told a joint session of Congress on March 1, 1945, “I learned more about the whole problem, the Moslem problem, the Jewish problem, by talking with ibn Saud for five minutes than I could have learned in an exchange of two or three dozen letters.”

“The choice of the desert king as expert on the Jewish question is nothing short of amazing,” Colorado Senator Edwin Johnson averred. “I imagine that even Fala [the president’s dog] would be more of an expert.”

What Ibn Saud told him was that the Arab world would never accept a Jewish state of any size in the Holy Land. Saud also “objected violently” to proposals to create a temporary haven in Libya for Jews fleeing the Nazis.

But it wasn’t just about Israel. It was also about who FDR was.

Published last year in this author’s FDR and the Holocaust, it derives from a conversation in 1939 between President Roosevelt and Senator Burton Wheeler (D-Montana), concerning possible Democratic candidates for president and vice president in 1940.  Towards the end of the meeting, the president expressed doubt that a ticket composed of Secretary of State Cordell Hull for president and Democratic National Committee chairman Jim Farley for vice president could be elected. Wheeler responded (according to a memorandum he composed following the meeting):

I said to the President someone told me that Mrs. Hull was a Jewess, and I said that the Jewish-Catholic issue would be raised [if Hull was nominated for president, and Farley, a Catholic, was his running mate]. He said, “Mrs. Hull is about one quarter Jewish.” He said, “You and I Burt are old English and Dutch stock. We know who our ancestors are. We know there is no Jewish blood in our veins, but a lot of these people do not know whether there is Jewish blood in their veins or not.”

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

March 12, 2014 | 20 Comments »
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20 Comments / 20 Comments

  2. @ Eric R.:
    This Jew voted twice for Richard M Nixon, in the US presidential elections of 1968 and 1972. By the way, I saw President Nixon in Jerusalem in the summer of 1974, shortly before he resigned from office. The occasion was a parade for him in Jerusalem, that wound its way up Rechov haPalmach, not far from where my wife and I lived at the time on Mevo Yoram, a short stub street off G’dud haIvri, which itself feeds off Rechov haPalmach. Nixon was standing in the back of an open convertible auto. He was wearing what looked like a grey silk suit, and his appearance, despite all his troubles over the Watergate issue in Washington, was good. As a matter of fact, all of us who saw him as a living person and not just as a photograph, thought he was handsome and distinguished.

    Everyone in Jerusalem knew he had over-ridden Kissinger’s opposition in order to get a badly-needed resupply of weapons to Israel. For that at least, may haShem remember him in the annals of the Jewish nation. And may Kissinger be forgotten.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  3. FDR was an anti-Semitic President who was responsible (by omission) in the Shoah. Carter was an anti-Semitic President who was not too bad in office, but his Nazi hatred came out later (and we will see how much of a Jew-hater Obama really is once he leaves office).

    However, two other Presidents whose anti-Semitism was no secret actually helped Israel – Truman by recognizing it over the stringent objections of the State Department, and Nixon by airlifting arms in 1973, thus possibly avoiding a second Shoah.

    Nixon is hated by American Jews who are mostly on the left (ironically, Nixon was not very conservative by today’s standards – he would be considered a RINO today – he grew government, increased taxes, was conciliatory toward the Soviets and got out of Vietnam), but my Israeli cousins think much better of him than most American Jews do.

  7. yamit82 Said:

    the shape and scope of the horror was pivotally determined by major American industrial giants.

    The Ford co. and many others should belong to the Jews. Maybe the future will rectify this error.

  8. yamit82 Said:

    They create an undeniably Nazi nexus between iconic American corporations and the greatest crime of the 20th century: the Holocaust. Who gave Hitler the initial basis for transmogrifying centuries of outgroup religious hatred into a new 20th-century political anti-Semitism?

    I believe that the plan to get rid of the Jews was part of the US capitalists plan, not just Hitler. Jews were closely identified with communism in russia and for spreading the ideas into the western world. By getting rid of the Jews you get rid of Communism. Germany was seen as the last stand gateway to Europe for the capitalists.

  10. I think FDR was just enjoying a mordant little joke with Stalin, targeting the Jew-hating king of Saudi Arabia. As for Stalin, I am sure he just sat there, puffing on his ever-present pipe and quietly listening to Roosevelt with an unreadable smile on his face.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  12. @ bernard ross:

    There were many people in the 30ties who were intrigued by Hitler. Evil is always so attractive. I don’t know why, but I have always found it so.

  13. honeybee Said:

    Don’t forget Joe Kennedy

    Of course and there are many more but I concentrated on the Bush clan because they were in it back then and in it today still controlling the levers of power through GB 1’s CIA connections of over 40 years. He has the information and connections to blackmail succeeding presidents into continuing the Polard incarceration and maintaining his family’s false narrative. In the 70’s he was CIA, 80’s and 90’s Veep and pres while grooming his sons as governors of texas and florida,2000’s his son as pres. Weinberger, one of his,was the front man pushing to keep Pollard in jail and the CIA has publicly opposed any release for 20 years. Bush is the man pulling the strings.

  14. @ bernard ross:

    The Nazi nexus EDWIN BLACK

    Adolf Hitler was completely responsible for the Holocaust. But Hitler had help.When zealous Nazis were motivated to wage war against an imaginary generation-to-generation Jewish conspiracy, when Nazis created ghastly extermination plans to help ensure their master race would rule the world, when the German military was enabled to smash across Europe with lightning speed in heavy Blitz trucks, bomb mercilessly from the air in advanced JU-88s and create carnage across the seas with deadly torpedoes, when Josef Mengele saw the scientific need to undertake heinous medical experiments on twins in Auschwitz, when the Reich was enabled to identify the Jews everywhere in Europe and then systematically pauperize and destroy them, when all these terrible things were done, the shape and scope of the horror was pivotally determined by major American industrial giants. Now the dots can be connected. They create an undeniably Nazi nexus between iconic American corporations and the greatest crime of the 20th century: the Holocaust. Who gave Hitler the initial basis for transmogrifying centuries of outgroup religious hatred into a new 20th-century political anti-Semitism?

    NAZI NEXUS
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8nB-5qWdvQ

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQPiub5Qyqw

  17. we are not in a different environment today. it should be remembered that the Bush clan relations with the CIA, the CIA nazi roots exposed by Francisco Gil White, Prescott Bush nazi financing and investing, should be viewed together today with Pollards obviously strange continued internment. Bush CIA connections by now have enormous blackmail files, using NSA spying, on politicians, institutional leaders, and media players are most likely the “odd” reason why seemingly repeated presidents from different parties keep Pollard in Jail. All of them are subject to manipulation by the Bush clique CIA info and connections. All of them came up through the ranks dirty. In fact, I believe that being dirty and having dirty secrets is an important qualification for rising up through the ranks and attracting the funding of the big players. A dirty candidate is a team player and can always be manipulated and protected by dirty bought media. Its not a planned conspiracy but a matter of having the right people on the team who will play ball when asked. this is much better than a planned conspiracy: to insure that most of the players rising to the top are on the same page and on the same team willing to do the same dirty work to protect their position and interests. all one needs are players recomended by existing team members in political parties, judiciary, law enforcement, academic institutions, churches, media,military, etc.: all of societies institutions. The NSA releases show that the right persons can be picked early for advancement and the wrong persons picked early for sabotage.