In a successful lawsuit, it was proven that the Internal Revenue Service under Barack Obama discriminated against Z-Street, a Zionist organization that disagreed with the President’s views regarding Israel. For the American Jewish community, it’s a reminder of a disturbing episode that took place during the Holocaust era.
The Jewish target of U.S. government wrath in the 1940s was the Bergson Group, a political action committee led by Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), a Zionist emissary from Palestine. The group used newspaper advertisements, rallies, and lobbying to press the Roosevelt administration to rescue Jews from the Nazis.
To put it mildly, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unhappy about those protests. One senior White House aide reported that FDR was “much displeased” when the Bergson Group brought 400 rabbis to Washington to plead for rescue. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told Bergson himself that the President was “very upset” about one of the group’s newspaper ads, which FDR felt was “hitting below the belt” because it accused him of turning a blind eye to the Nazi massacres.
The State Department, too, was annoyed by Bergson’s campaign for rescue. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long privately complained that the group’s newspaper ads “made it very difficult for the Department.” Long’s deputy, Robert Alexander, absurdly claimed that the slogan used in one Bergson ad, “Action–Not Pity,” had actually been invented by the Nazis as part of a conspiracy to embarrass the Allies.
Beginning in 1942, the Roosevelt administration sent the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service after Bergson. They were looking for evidence of criminal activity, but their motivation was political. An internal FBI memo I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act bluntly explained why U.S. government action against Bergson: “This man has been in the hair of [Secretary of State] Cordell Hull.”