If the Soviets “put Jews into gas chambers,” Kissinger said, it’s “not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."
 
  "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy." Henry Kissinger, quoted by Bob Woodward in The Final Days, 1976
 
  To bad the Jewish people only seem to be upset about Kissinger’s comment about Jews and not his attitude concerning American service personnel.

  The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer. "[The New World Order] cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the most significant single component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change it's perceptions." -- Henry Kissenger, World Affairs Council Press Conference, Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel , April 19th 1994
 
 
Decades Later, Kissinger’s Words Stir Fresh Outrage Among Jews
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: December 16, 2010

  Richard M. Nixon has long been the Freddy Krueger of American political life. You know in your bones that he is destined to keep returning.
  Sure enough, though dead 16 years, Nixon is back onstage, with the release of a fresh batch of tapes from his Oval Office days. They show him at his omni-bigoted worst, offering one slur after another against the Irish, Italians and blacks. Characteristically, he saved his most potent acid for Jews. “The Jews,” he said, “are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”
  But Nixon’s hard-wired anti-Semitism is an old story. What has caused many heads to swivel is a recording of Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser. Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime — a huge issue at the time — was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”
  “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
  In New York, the epicenter of Jewish life in the United States, some jaws are still not back in place after dropping to the floor.
  Bad enough that any senior White House official would, without prodding, raise the grotesque specter of Jews once again being herded into gas chambers. But it was unbearable for some to hear that language come from Mr. Kissinger, a Jew who as a teenager fled Nazi Germany with his family, in 1938. Had he not found refuge in this country and in this city — the Kissingers settled in Washington Heights — he might have ended up in a gas chamber himself.
  “Despicable,” “callous,” “revulsion,” “hypocrite,” “chilling” and “shocking” were a few of the words used this week by some leaders of Jewish organizations and by newspapers that focus on Jewish matters.
  Conspicuously, however, many groups and prominent individuals stayed silent. They include people who would have almost certainly spoken up had coldhearted talk of genocide come from the likes of Mel Gibson or Patrick J. Buchanan, neither a stranger to provocative comments about Jews.
  Even some who deplored Mr. Kissinger’s remarks tempered their criticism. The Anti-Defamation League called the recorded statements “outrageous,” but said they did not undermine “the important contributions and ultimate legacy of Henry Kissinger,” including his support of Israel. The American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but suggested that anti-Semitism in the Nixon White House might have been at least partly to blame.
  “Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,” the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in a statement.
  There was no hedging in editorials by Jewish-themed newspapers like The Forward and The Jewish Week. Separately, in a Jewish Week column, Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a New York lawyer who is active in Holocaust-related issues, dismissed Mr. Kissinger as “the quintessential court Jew.” And J. J. Goldberg, a Forward columnist, wrote, “No one has ever gone broke overstating Kissinger’s coldbloodedness.”
  Now 87, Mr. Kissinger confined himself this week to a brief statement that said his taped comments “must be viewed in the context of the time.”
  Back then, American Jewish groups strongly supported legislation that would have made any improvement in American-Soviet trade relations contingent on freer emigration by Soviet Jews. The president and Mr. Kissinger rejected that approach, which was rooted in human rights concepts not suited to their power politics, or realpolitik. They were bluntly angry at Jewish organizations for pushing hard on the issue.
  In his statement, Mr. Kissinger said of Jewish emigration that “we dealt with it as a humanitarian matter separate from the foreign policy issues.” That approach, he said, led to a significant rise in the number of Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In fact, it did, for a while anyway.
  Still, that “gas chamber” line is about as ugly as it gets. It seems unlikely to change many views of a man who is both widely admired and widely hated, but there is one word that just might haunt Mr. Kissinger to his final days.
  Genocide is “not an American concern,” he said, but “maybe a humanitarian concern.”
Maybe, the man said.
E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com
 
How Kissinger Saved the Jews
Good Fences
By J.J. Goldberg
December 15, 2010

  The year was 1973, and Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from German Nazism and President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, made a staggeringly distasteful comment about Soviet Jews: If the Soviets “put Jews into gas chambers,” Kissinger said, it’s “not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Maybe.
  No one has ever gone broke overstating Kissinger’s cold-bloodedness. This one, though, revealed in the latest declassified installment of Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, is a doozy. Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson spoke for most of the punditocracy in calling the taped remark “the most despicable thing to come out of the mouth of a major American official… since God only knows when."
  The disclosure was so shocking, the response so scathing, that Kissinger himself, never known to leave a slight unanswered, seems to have been left temporarily speechless. It took him a full three days to reply. And when he did reply, in a 173-word statement, it was uncharacteristically hesitant, convoluted and flaccid. Its one redeeming quality was that it was true
  Kissinger’s statement begins by pleading that the comment “must be viewed in the context of the time,” the classic defense of someone who’s knows he’s lost the argument. He and Nixon had been pressing Moscow to let Jews out since early in Nixon’s administration, he says. However, “In order to avoid questions of sovereignty, we dealt with it as a humanitarian matter separate from the foreign policy issues.” In this way, by “persistent private representation at the highest level we managed to raise emigration from 700 per year to close to 40,000 in 1972."
  The “context of the time” included a nasty political battle between the White House and the organized Jewish community over a piece of legislation known as the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The measure proposed pushing Moscow to ease Jewish emigration by making it a precondition for normal U.S.-Soviet trade relations. It won nearly unanimous approval in Congress in late 1974 despite fierce administration opposition, arguably the strongest display ever seen of American Jewish political muscle.
  The administration’s opposition stemmed partly from Kissinger’s fear that the tough stance would damage his signature goal of U.S.-Soviet detente. Kissinger doesn’t mention that in his new statement. Instead, he cites other, more flattering motives. First, the amendment “made Jewish emigration a foreign policy issue” rather than a humanitarian issue as Kissinger favored. Second, “We feared that the Amendment would reduce emigration, which is exactly what happened. Jewish emigration never reached the level of 40,000 again until the Soviet Union collapsed.”
  The numbers question is important, but the distinction between “foreign policy” and “humanitarian” issues is critical, because it’s central to Kissinger’s philosophy of international relations. It’s also the key point he was crudely trying to drive home to Nixon in that taped conversation.
  Unlike most other secretaries of state, Kissinger entered government service as an established foreign policy theorist with an articulate, well-known philosophy. In signing on with Nixon, Kissinger received a unique opportunity to test his theories in the real world. Enduring his boss’s bullying anti-Semitism was a small price to pay.
  Kissinger is known as a leading proponent of realpolitik or diplomatic realism. It teaches that the ultimate goal of diplomacy is not improving the world or helping the weak but the unsentimental acquisition and wielding of power in order to protect the state’s material interests.
  In Kissinger’s view, America’s essential interest is to maintain, as ruthlessly as necessary, a stable balance of power among major state actors. Humanitarian goals like freedom and minority rights flow from international stability, not the other way around.
  In his statement, Kissinger cites Soviet Jewish emigration numbers to justify his policies. He’s a bit confused there, but only a bit. Between 1970 and 1973, before Jackson-Vanik passed, emigration rose from 1,000 to 35,000, not 700 to 40,000 as Kissinger says. And the flow actually shot up once more, reaching 51,000 in 1979, when a disastrous wheat harvest forced Moscow to seek a boost in their American grain contracts.
  Broadly speaking, though, he’s right: Emigration rose dramatically under Kissinger’s detente policy, plummeted after Jackson-Vanik passed, rose briefly during the dovish Carter administration, then dropped under the anticommunist champion Ronald Reagan to a mere 1,400 per year. Emigration numbers finally rose for good during the Reagan-Gorbachev honeymoon in communism’s last years.
  In the end, the debate is not between pursuing and ignoring human rights, but between realpolitik and Wilsonian idealism as the best way to get there. Kissinger chose the former.
  Does that justify bombing Cambodia or assassinating the president of Chile? Even by Kissinger’s hard-headed standards, the answer should have been no, if only because they didn’t improve anything.
  Though he rarely admitted it, Kissinger drew his philosophy from his own life story: Only by pursuing stability can you prevent the sort of chaos that swept Europe in the 1930s and engulfed most of Kissinger’s family. Here’s what he told an Israel Bonds dinner in 1992:
  “I have been put in the position, as a Jew, of conducting the foreign policy of a superpower. I have never obscured the fact that 12 members of my family died in the Holocaust, and that therefore the fate of the Jewish people was always a matter of profound concern to me. However, destiny put me in a position where I also had to look at other perspectives."
Contact J.J. Goldberg at goldberg@forward.com and follow his blog at www.forward.com
   
  If the Soviets “put Jews into gas chambers,” Kissinger said, it’s “not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."
  
  "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy." Henry Kissinger, quoted by Bob Woodward in The Final Days, 1976

  To bad the Jewish people only seem to be upset about Kissinger’s comment about Jews and not his attitude concerning American service personnel.