Editorials

Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, the liberal in phrase-making and the reactionary by instinct, has had the dubious pleasure of playing intellectual host to Dr. Hans Luther, Heil Hitler’s Ambassador at Washington. Dr. Luther came up to New York the other night to address, by Butlerian invitation, the so-called Institute of Arts and Sciences and delivered himself of such putrid hypocritical nonsense about Hitlerian democracy and peace and disarmament that even those respectable members in the audience who weren’t ejected for shouting, “Down with Hitler, Down with the Nazis” could not refrain from laughing. Some of the boys of the Social Problems Club and affiliated organizations marched down Broadway with anti-Nazi banners and Dr. Luther took himself off to Washington again, to await the next invitation from some pro-Nazi outfit or from some “liberal-minded” college president in order that by dint of press clippings and photographs the German Ambassador to the United States may prove to his employers that he is doing his damnedest as chief official propaganda agent for Hitlerism. Perhaps if Ambassador Luther makes several dozens of other Heil Hitler speeches as the Ambassadorial front for the furtive and cowardly Nazi propagandists of anti-Semitism in the United States, even Secretary of State Hull will not be so ready to furnish him with further consignments of official whitewash when a man like Samuel Untermyer, for example, accuses him of using his Embassy for the furtherance of race-hate propaganda.

Officially, of course, Ambassador Luther is to be condemned for subverting his office to base uses; unofficially, it is possible to be sorry for the fellow. There is little doubt that he is not so comfortable in his job as he might be. It is not the most pleasant thing in the world to be running from Washington to Milwaukee and back to Washington and then to New York and then to Philadelphia and after a perturbed several days or so in the Capital to go on to Pittsburgh, saying Heil Hitler all the time, with no more than enough enthusiasm to fool the press as to your real feelings. For Dr. Luther knows, and all informed people know, that Dr. Luther was kicked upstairs by the Nazis; he was kicked upstairs from the Reichsbank because he was not willing to consent to the Nazi party’s raid on the bank’s reserves, to the Embassy at Washington be###se, for better or for worse, the Nazis had more jobs to fill than intelligent Nazis to fill them with.

It is Dr. Butler, the ambitious, self-seeking, social-climbing intellectual Germano-phobe, the professed pacifist, who is betraying his trust by opening his doors to Nazi propagandists. Dr. Butler has received honors from Kaiser Germany; he is now returning the debt to Hitler’s Reich.

ON THE DEFENSIVE

Is there one kind of justice for the Arab on the offensive and another for the Jew on the defensive? Is the direction of British colonial polity to teach Zionists that they too must be militant, even at the price of several cracked skulls. Must the Jewish voice be constantly clamant even in the courts of the nation which is supposed to administer Palestine for the Jews?

There is no doubt that the Arab demonstrations toward the end of October have been successful, at least in their immediate result. Arabs were killed, both among the demonstrators and among the repulsing police, but more than one bone of concession has been thrown, and not contemptuously, toward the Arabs. It would almost seem as if the English did give the demonstrating Arabs just about enough rein to be able to say to the Jews: “Do you see now what we’re up against; we can’t issue even one-fourth of the immigration certificates you require; we can’t possibly let you have it all your own way and expect peace in Palestine.” After the demonstrations came the intensification of the spy-system drive against tourists who have been overstaying their leave, and one case has been reported of an old Jew who, terrified at the prospect of having to return to the land from which he came, killed himself.

But in the meantime what is being done about Arab immigrants who are coming in unchecked from the Eastern frontier and whom no spy system troubles to expel for lack of visas? In Davar, Hebrew labor daily, one reads that Arab migration into Palestine passes unnoticed by the proper officials, while in Doar Hayom, another Hebrew journal, the charge is made that the very Arab leaders who have been raising a howl about Jewish land purchases have themselves offered to act as agents in the transfer of lands, in order to disguise the true ownership by Jews. The fact of the matter is that they have been making financial capital out of the prosperity which Jewish enterprise has been bringing Palestine and political capital by instigating their fellahin against the Jew. Throughout the Diaspora at the present time it is stated, as a reproach to the Jew, that he takes for himself part of the meagre resources of the land in which he lives, and one of the arguments in many places against the reception of German Jewish refugees is that there isn’t enough prosperity to go around; but in Palestine this reasoning is perversely distorted, for the Jew brings prosperity to his neighbors and he is resented, in spite of the fact that he brings prosperity—for the simple reason that he is not an Arab.

If Jews have no right in Germany, surely there must be one place in the universe where they have rights and the right to demand those rights.