In 1916 a German spy ring set off explosions on Black Tom Island in New York's harbor, using the United States' own munitions.
Watch Black Tom Shell on PBS. See more from History Detectives.
Woodrow scapegoated a private Rail Road company for the German terrorists. Thus, Woodrow killed two birds with one stone: he attacked private free market capitalism, specifically, the railroads, which he eventually nationalized, and exonerated foreign terrorists. After World War I, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, who owned Black Tom, and others, brought charges of German sabotage before the Mixed Claims Commission under the 1921 Treaty of Berlin between the United States and Germany....After the war, Germany agreed to settle on outstanding war claims that included those related to the Black Tom explosion and they were paid in 1979.Similarly, Obama's scapegoating a purported anti-Muslim youtube video exonerates Al Qaeda and provides credence to his promotion of global blasphemy laws, as Pamela Geller has pointed out:
“He is sanctioning Islam’s blasphemy laws, which forbid criticism of Islam. The sanctioning of the blasphemy laws and the threat – and now reality of Islamic violence against those who transgress against those laws – has led to this act of war, and will lead to further acts of war,”Of course, Wilson also supported censorship during WWI, but usually to avoid offending the sensitives of our friends versus our foes, as the filmmaker about the US Revolutionary War found out in the quixotically named case, The United States of America vs. "The Spirit of '76":
Chicago's police confiscated the film at the insistence of President Woodrow Wilson. Some say that the President was acting at the request of the Britain, America's newly found ally. An American named Robert Goldstein had produced the film. He was also a Jewish immigrant from Germany.
Posts
