{"id":421,"date":"2008-01-11T15:44:30","date_gmt":"2008-01-11T15:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/news\/2008\/01\/bush-us-should-have-bombed-aus.php"},"modified":"2008-01-11T15:44:30","modified_gmt":"2008-01-11T15:44:30","slug":"bush-us-should-have-bombed-aus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/news\/2008\/01\/bush-us-should-have-bombed-aus","title":{"rendered":"Bush: US Should Have Bombed Auschwitz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Associated Press – January 11, 2008 <\/strong>
\nJERUSALEM – President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel’s Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial’s chairman said.
\nBush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial calling it a “sobering reminder” that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith.
\nWearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.
\nBush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev.
\n“Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes,” Shalev said.
\nAt one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.
\n“We were talking about the often-discussed ‘Could the United States have done more by bombing the train tracks?'” Rice told reporters later aboard Air Force One. “And so we were just talking about the various explanations that had been given about why that might not have been done.”
\nThe Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort, a decision that became the subject of intense controversy years later.
\nBetween 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed at the camp.
\n“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.
\nIn the memorial’s visitors’ book, the president wrote simply, “God bless Israel, George Bush.”
\nThe memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard Friday, with armed soldiers standing on top of some of the site’s monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.
\n“I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls – young and old – stood strong for what they believe,” Bush said.
\n“I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it,” he said.
\nIt was Bush’s second visit to the Holocaust memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last U.S. president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.
\nBush, making the most extensive Mideast trip of his presidency, was accompanied on his tour by a small party that included Rice and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
\nAt the compound, overlooking a forest on Jerusalem’s outskirts, Bush visited a memorial to the 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust, featuring six candles reflected 1.5 million times in a hall of mirrors. At the site’s Hall of Remembrance, he heard a cantor sing a Jewish prayer for the dead.
\nShalev presented Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.
\nDeutsch created the works while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in the Buchenwald camp. After the war, his daughter Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables but had left behind a single item: a meticulously crafted wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist’s illustrations of biblical scenes.
\nThe originals are on display at Yad Vashem. The memorial recently decided to produce a special series of 500 replicas, the first of which was to be presented to Bush.
\nDebbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Deutsch’s brother, said she was proud that Bush would be given her relative’s artwork.
\n“These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed,” she said.
\nLater Friday, Bush was to wrap up his three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories with a visit to Christian holy sites in Galilee before departing for Kuwait, the next stop on his Mideast tour.
\nCopyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Associated Press – January 11, 2008 JERUSALEM – President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel’s Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial’s chairman said. 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A New Yorker by birth but a Floridian by tenure, Nicole graduated from Florida A&M University with a B.S. in Public Relations and a minor in Sociology. She moved to NY to pursue a career in journalism which started at In Style magazine. There she learned the ropes of magazine reporting, researching, and writing\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand became exponentially more stylish. But what seemed like a deep interest in fashion and entertainment would soon be revealed as merely the vehicle that moved her closer to discovering her purpose, writing and covering matters of the Christian faith. While in her purpose-driven vehicle she can be found traveling between Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens for life, work and worship, respectively. 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