JVLV: MADELEINE ALBRIGHT'S FATHER WOULD STAND WITH DONALD TRUMP ON IMMIGRATION! By Jiri and Leni Friedman Valenta

Unafraid, Bi-Partisan, Uphold U.S. and Freedom

 

How easily we forget! Today we commemorate the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz 72 years ago. It was too late for my great grandfather, Arnold Stein, his daughter, my Aunt Ella, and other Jewish relatives.They were gassed in 1942. Also too late for dozens of Madeleine Albright’s Czech Jewish relatives, including three grandparents and her cousin, Melena Deimlova.

 

Yet on the eve of this sacred day, Secretary Albright has boldly declared she is prepared to “register as a Muslim,” Why? Because Donald Trump is seeking an indefinite ban on Muslims from states that are “hotbeds of terrorism.” 

 

"I was raised Catholic, became Episcopalian & found out later my family was Jewish,” declared Madeleine. I stand ready to register as Muslim in solidarity."

 

A principled stand? Let’s examine it. “I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish,”said Madeleine in 2012,” while promoting her new memoir, Prague Winter. “I had no idea that two dozen of my relatives died in the Holocaust,”she added, stating she only learned from her biographer, Michael Dobbs, in 1997.

 

What she didn’t tell the Baltimore Sun was that Dobbs concluded and revealed after extensive research, “… Madeleine learned essential details of her family’s past long before February 1997.” How long?

 

I learned in 1974. My friend and key mentor was Madeleine’s father, Czech-born Professor Josef Korbel, for whom I worked as a research assistant on two books dealing with Czech history from 1973-74.

 

I suspected he was Jewish, but the truth came out at a 1974 dinner at my apartment. When I played my favorite old Jewish song, “My Yiddish Mama,” Madeleine’s mother, Mandula, cried and told me all. When I asked Jozka if Madeleine knew she was Jewish, he told me, “Of course she does.” I later mentioned my findings in two articles for Midstream (“Top Family Secrets”) and Forward, published in the 1990’s.

 

I also learned from Jozka how the Korbels fled from Czechoslovakia to England on the eve of WWII. There, he converted his whole family to Catholicism to ensure their future safety. Yet Madeleine says she “discovered” she was Jewish only after Dobbs, uncovered her secret.

 

Madeleine later converted again, this time from Catholic to Episcopalian when she married wealthy Joseph Albright of Cox Newspapers. Did she ever tell her husband she was born Jewish? Most likely not, if you rely on Dobbs. He reports that while visiting Prague in 1967, “she went to see a first cousin of her mother, Peter Novak,” survivor of a concentration camp.

 

perting Joe to look out for “secret police” that might be following them, she visited gravely ill Peter alone and never introduced them. She also told Joe, Peter was “a friend,” a “Czech patriot,” not her cousin. Yet, Dobbs concluded he had been “rounded up as a Jew, not a Czech patriot.” Madeleine, he wrote, “says she did not put the pieces together at that time.”

 

To most people their religion, its rites, cultural norms values and traditions, is a heartfelt experience. It is something you might necessarily change to save your life, as did her father, but it is not something you change, or about which you prevaricate, to gain wealth, celebrity or to make a political statement.

 

Jozka was my mentor and old friend whose powerful recommendation helped me get my first serious job at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate Naval School in Monterrey in 1976. I am proud to have a fellow Czech with a Jewish background as the first female Secretary of State in America’s history. I know Madeleine's father Jozka would have been proud of her achievements as well. However, I also believe Jozka, would not have supported her play on registering as a Muslim to protest Donald Trump’s immigration plan. Donald is not an Islamphobe. He wants to ban Muslims from Syria and other sharia law countries until or unless our vetting procedures can be greatly improved.

 

As I learned first hand, Korbel was a great supporter of FDR’s policy of keeping German Nazi’s or sympathizers with Hitler’s regime out of the U.S.in the World War II. He also vehemently supported the expulsion of Nazis and pro-Nazi sympathizers from Czechoslovakia in 1946. Indeed, most of the Germans from the Sudetenland who were forced out did support the Third Reich. Korbel viewed it not as ethnic cleansing but defense of Czechoslovak national interests.

 

To adamantly pro-American Korbel, the Islam o-fascists Trump seeks to ban would be the reincarnation of the German fascists. Unlike Madeleine, Korbel would stand with Trump!

 

Leni Friedman Valenta is the CEO of the Institute of Post-Communist Studies and Terrorism and editor-in-chief of its website, jvlv.net. Jiri, the institute’s president, is a former associate professor and coordinator of Soviet and East European Studies at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. The Valentas are co-authors of several articles in The National Interest and Jiri’s forthcoming memoir, Are you Starting a Revolution Here?