Ibn Saud, the Jews and FDR’s dog - by Rafael Medoff

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

Rafael Medoff..
JPost/Opinion..
05 April '20..
Link: https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-Saudis-the-Jews-and-FDRs-dog-623617

Seventy-five years after president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s controversial embrace of the king of Saudi Arabia, FDR’s grandson has become part of a Saudi-financed public relations campaign to celebrate his late grandfather’s pro-Saudi policies.

Hall Delano Roosevelt has been working with the LS2 Group, an Iowa-based public relations firm, to draw attention to the recent 75th anniversary of FDR’s meeting with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, according to documents released by the Arab-American news site Al-Monitor. In the LST Group’s Foreign Agents Registration filings last year, it stated that it was being paid $126,500 monthly by the Saudi Embassy in Washington to provide “public relations and media management services.”

The FDR-Ibn Saud meeting took place on February 14, 1945, on the deck of the USS Quincy. The king came aboard “with his whole court, [black] slaves, taster, astrologer, & 8 live sheep,” FDR wrote to his cousin, Margaret Suckley. “Whole party was a scream!” The president does not seem to have expressed concern about the slaves.

The US ambassador to Riyadh, William Eddy, was the official note-taker. He wrote down the two leaders’ remarks in the form of a “Memorandum of Conversation,” which both the president and the king signed. One of the topics they discussed was whether or not the Arab world could accept the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Roosevelt asked Ibn Saud for his view of “the problem of Jewish refugees driven from their homes in Europe.”

Ibn Saud responded that he opposed “continued Jewish immigration and the purchase of land [in Palestine] by the Jews.” The king insisted that “the Arabs and the Jews could never cooperate, neither in Palestine, nor in any other country.”

President Roosevelt “replied that he wished to assure his majesty that he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people.”

The king asserted that the Jews should be “given living space in the Axis countries which oppressed them,” rather than Palestine.

In response, “The president remarked that Poland might be considered a case in point. The Germans appear to have killed three million Polish Jews, by which count there should be space in Poland for the resettlement of many homeless Jews.”

Medoff - Benzion Netanyahu’s eyewitness report on America’s response to the Holocaust.

Rafael Medoff..
Insights/JPost..
03 May '12..

Over the years, I had the opportunity to conduct a number of lengthy interviews with Prof. Benzion Netanyahu, who passed away early Monday, concerning his activities in the United States in the 1940s, when he was executive director of the American wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement.

The previously unpublished interview below took place in June 2009, as I was working on my book, Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel (coauthored with Prof. Sonja Schoepf Wentling), which was published last month.

In your view, why were American Jewish leaders so cautious during the 1940s?

Part of the problem was how they saw themselves. In their contacts with president Roosevelt, Jewish leaders thought of themselves as weak or helpless. Take, for example, Rabbi Stephen Wise – leader of the American Zionist movement, the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress. He thought of himself as a servant of president Roosevelt.

He referred to Roosevelt as “chief,” and he really meant it that way – Roosevelt as was the chief, and Wise was the servant. Wise was happy to just follow along with whatever Roosevelt wanted. He was content as long as FDR just remembered his name or gave him a few minutes of his time every once in a while.