Year In Review

Tragic Lessons Unlearned

Refugees from Haiti seeking asylum and reports of 'ethnic cleansing'
in Bosnia stir painful memories.

linost 50 years after the grand dragon, ran a sanitized white
end of World War II, supremacist campaign in his bid for the
there were disturbing governorship of Louisiana. Only when,
echoes of the Holocaust toward the end of the campaign, there
this year. From the po- seemed a real chance that he might win,
litical anti-Semitism of was there an outcry against his views
David Duke in Louisiana to the callous and tactics.
decision in Washington to refuse asy-
The genocide in. Bosnia, where Serbs
lum to Haitian refugees to reports of were rounding up Muslims and
"ethnic cleansing" in the former Yu- Catholics as political prisoners, startled
goslavia, the world seemed to have for- the world — particularly the photos of
gotten the tragic lessons of the Nazi era. painfully thin men staring blankly
David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan through barbed wire fences.

There were those in the Jewish com-
munity who debated the comparison to
the Holocaust, but many looked beyond
the semantics to seek to redress these
crimes against humanity. American
Jewish groups were among the first, and
most outspoken, to urge the free world
to step in and put an end to the brutal-
ization of innocents. And tiny Israel,
despite its own enormous financial bur-
dens, sent supplies of food and medicine.
Closer to home, Jewish groups spoke
out against Washington's decision to

turn away refugees fleeing Haiti by boat
in search of political asylum. National
Jewish organizations noted that Jewish
tradition insists on showing compassion
toward others, and Jewish history teach-
es only too well that to forcibly return
people to a nation ruled by despots all
too often condemns them to unspeak-
able horrors.
Holocaust survivors, including Nobel
Peace laureate Elie Wiesel, called on the
United States to learn that passivity and
inaction are immoral responses in the