https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cold-war-henry-kissinger/2023-05-25/henry-kissingers-documented-legacy
-
Henry Kissinger: ‘If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic.’
Quote:
While accepting honors from Jewish organizations, Kissinger has also behaved and spoken in ways that estranged some of his fellow Jews.
In 1985, he publicly supported President Ronald Reagan’s wreath-laying ceremony at a military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany where members of the Waffen-SS are buried. Kissinger opposed the idea of a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, because such an institution next to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., might create “too high a profile” for American Jews and “reignite antisemitism.”
Among his statements, one from March 1973 caused a stir when it was published in 2010. Taped in conversation with Richard Nixon soon after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, Kissinger disdained the notion of pressuring the USSR about persecuted Soviet Jews, saying: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
In 2011, hitherto secret U.S. State Department documents from late 1972 were likewise published, revealing that Kissinger was irked by the concern expressed by American Jews about the fate of Soviet Jewry, calling the former “self-serving…bastards.”
Walter Isaacson explains that at a contemporaneous meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group, a government crisis task force, Kissinger grumbled, “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic.” He added: “Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”
During a Vietnam War-era chat from October 1973 with Brent Scowcroft, Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Kissinger found American Jews and Israelis “as obnoxious as the Vietnamese.”
In another transcribed telephone conversation from November 1973, Kissinger declared: “I’m going to be the first Jew accused of antisemitism.” This sally reflects obliviousness to the longstanding concept of Jewish self-hatred described by cultural historian Sander Gilman and analyzed in Theodor Herzl’s “The Jewish State” (1896).
Kissinger also mocked those who defended Jews, especially Israelis. One such target was presidential adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose pro-Israel stance evoked this comment from Kissinger: “We are conducting foreign policy. … This is not a synagogue.”
Kissinger further inquired derisively if the Irish-Catholic Moynihan wished to convert to Judaism.
https://forward.com/culture/470300/kissinger-at-100-if-it-were-not-for-the-accident-of-my-birth-i-would-be/
-
Many people remember Kissinger as talking openly about illegal things.
“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.” (from March 10, 1975 meeting with Turkish foreign minister Melih Esenbel in Ankara, Turkey)
-