Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (24 page)

President Woodrow Wilson

Couldn’t stop Britain and Zionism
sewing the seeds of catastrophe

President Franklin D Roosevelt

Troubled by Zionism and not in
favour of a Jewish State

King Ibn Saud

Saudi Arabia founder who warned the
US about making enemies of the Arabs

Bernard Mannes Baruch

Jewish American advisor to Presidents
with great influence for Zionism

King Abdullah of Jordan

Annexed part of Palestine to
prevent Israel taking it

The Arabs did have reason to put their trust in America’s good intentions as they were represented and presented by President Wilson,and to believe he would see to it that Britain honoured its promise to them.

Woodrow Wilson was a man of many abilities who wanted to use the power of the presidency to change the world for the better, and who really believed that doing so was a mission possible.

It can also be said that few if any American presidents before or since were as highly qualified as Woodrow Wilson for public service to the world as well as the Land of the Free. He was a political scientist and historian by training but his thinking was the product of his heart as well as his mind. He received his Ph.D. after advanced studies in government and history at Johns Hopkins University. After serving the Princetown faculty as professor of jurisprudence and political economy, he was chosen to be the president of that most prestigious university. Unlike so many academics he was able to communicate his ideas vertically. I mean that he could talk down his highest ideas for understanding by those on lower intellectual levels. His academic lectures, like all of his public addresses and published writings, were characterised by what others described as “clarity of presentation and brilliance of phrasing.”
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He also had broad cultural interests. To those who worked sympathetically with him and under him he displayed “a magnetic personality.” He was genial, humorous and considerate. From his sympathetic subordinates he received admiration and affection.

But what made President Wilson a chief most worthy of being hailed was something much more than the extent and the quality of his vision about how the world ought to be—if it was to be managed for the benefit of the whole of mankind and not just the few in the most wealthy and powerful nations. He believed, really believed, that the President should be the leader and not the follower of public opinion.

Before the Europeans went to war, the guiding principles of the foreign policy President Wilson wanted to pursue were these: a refusal to exert America’s material power against weaker nations; a belief that the rights and interests of small nations should be respected; and the view that peoples then dominated by the big European powers should be set on the road to self-determination.

But President Wilson failed, not for the want of trying, to deliver on his principles.

Because of that failure America would become with time the leading supporter of Israel right or wrong; a fact of international life that allowed the Zionist state to behave without regard for international law and, along the way, to pursue, with an arrogance to match its overwhelming military might, expansionist policies which heaped humiliation after humiliation upon all Arabs and the entire Muslim world. The phenomenon of anti-Americanism has its origins in America’s retreat from the moral high ground in 1919.

Whether the retreat would have happened if President Wilson had not suffered a stroke at a critical moment is a good question.

The story this chapter tells is how neutral America was forced into war after President Wilson’s mediation to bring it to an early end had been accepted by Germany and rejected by Britain and France; and how, then, America ended up going along with British policy for the Middle East—a policy President Wilson did not favour because it was in opposition to his deeply held principles and his ideas for creating a New World Order out of the ruins of the Old.

America proclaimed its neutrality on 4 August 1914, the same day as Britain declared war on Germany.

With Europe on the road to madness (as in non-nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction), Americans were doggedly united in their wish not to be involved in Europe’s war unless American rights were violated.

Two weeks after the formal proclamation of neutrality, President Wilson made a direct appeal to his people. He asked them to remain neutral in thought as well as behaviour. His most passionate desire was to bring the war in Europe to the earliest possible end through his personal and secret mediation. For that purpose he was determined to be seen by each and all of the warring parties in Europe as a truly impartial mediator.

His initial offers to mediate were rejected by both Britain and France and by Germany.

Then, early in 1916, President Wilson sent Colonel Edward M. House to Europe to try to persuade Britain and France to be serious about giving his secret mediation a fair chance. Wilson had reason to believe that he could persuade Germany to do so. House was authorised to tell the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, that the President, “on hearing from Britain and France that the moment was opportune”, would propose a conference to end the war.
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In the hope that he was making Britain and France an offer of mediation they could not refuse, Wilson authorised House to say that if the Allies accepted his proposal and Germany refused it, the United States “would probably enter the war against Germany.”

On 22 February 1916, the outcome of the secret discussions in London was the House-Grey Memorandum. It stated that America might enter the war if Germany rejected Wilson’s mediation, but it also said Britain was reserving her right “to initiate American mediation.”

President Wilson could not have been pleased. Effectively he had been rebuffed by the British. Thereafter he pressed Grey to initiate American mediation because he knew that German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (hereafter Bethmann) was in favour of it. Britain and France continued to say “No” to Wilson’s mediation but Chancellor Bethmann said “Yes”.

In Germany from the summer of 1916 Chancellor Bethmann advocated a negotiated peace despite the fact that his own militarists were pressing him to allow them to escalate the war, by resorting (actually returning) to unrestricted submarine warfare. Bethmann was aware that if any neutral American vessel was attacked and American lives were lost, President Wilson would probably be obliged to declare war on Germany and join the Allied camp. Bethmann did not want to provoke that. (Germany’s militarists had resorted to all-out submarine warfare at a very early point in the conflict, but Bethmann under pressure from Wilson had persuaded them to call it off).

Bethmann was then informed that he would have to be patient because President Wilson had to take time out of his mediation effort to get reelected. With great difficulty the German Chancellor succeeded in postponing a decision to return to unrestricted submarine warfare.

Wilson was re-elected on 7 November but he let a month pass without doing anything to press upon the British his case for mediation. In that month Bethmann lost patience with Wilson. He did so because he came under irresistible pressure from his militarists. To delay further the unleashing of the unrestricted submarine warfare they wanted, Bethmann had to do a deal with them. It was that instead of waiting for President Wilson to act, Germany would announce its own peace proposals and, if the Allies rejected them, the German submarine fleet would be given unlimited freedom without further discussion.

On 12 December Germany announced the terms of its own peace offer. They were so unfavourable to Britain and France that they were bound to be rejected. They were. Unfortunately, Bethmann had played the last card in his struggle to keep his own militarists in check.

President Wilson was in despair. On 18 December he invited both belligerent camps to state their war aims and the terms on which they were prepared to end the conflict. This, Wilson hoped, would be, at last, the prelude to negotiations for peace. The Allies were annoyed by Wilson’s initiative and offered terms too sweeping for the Germans to accept. The Germans suspected collusion between President Wilson and the Allies but still agreed in principle to the opening of negotiations, while keeping their own unacceptable offer of 12 December on the table as a bargaining chip. But no further progress was made and that initiative was dead by the middle of January 1917.

There was collusion between neutral America and Britain but it had taken place behind the President’s back. The British had been secretly encouraged by President Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, to put forward terms that would guarantee Germany’s rejection of the President’s mediation.

President Wilson, real leader that he was, responded with what amounted to a pre-emptive policy strike against those in his own camp who were playing games with Britain and, in the President’s view, had compromised the neutrality he valued so highly.

Wilson’s pre-emptive strike, on 22 January 1917, was in the form of a remarkable address to Congress. In it President Wilson made a dramatic appeal, this time not only for negotiations to end the great European war then taking its remorseless course and terrible toll, but for negotiations to end the fighting on terms that would lead to a just and lasting peace. It was not a speech any politician who happened to be President could have made. It was the speech of a real, towering statesman, a true giant among men.