Posted on 02/26/24
| News Source: The Hill
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Sunday pointed to the deaths of his Jewish ancestors during World War II in his push for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to put the $95 billion foreign aid package, which includes aid for Ukraine, on the House floor.
Schumer, speaking at a press conference from New York, pushed back on the “isolationist” approach to global conflicts and the death and destruction caused by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in World War II.
“There are those in the House — these far-right people — who are isolationists. They said, ‘This is far away, we don’t have to bother,’’” Schumer said Sunday. “That’s what the world said in 1938 with Hitler, and America paid the price — hundreds of thousands of deaths, billions of dollars spent. That’s what people said in 1916 here in the U.S., and a prolonged World War I then cost us dearly, leading to World War II. So, these isolationists have not learned the lesson of history.”
Schumer then told a personal anecdote about his ancestors in Chortkiv, Galicia — a city in western Ukraine where several groups of Jewish people resided prior to the Holocaust.
“In 1941, the Nazis came in, they told my grandmother, who was well known in the town of Chortkiv, to gather her family on the porch. Thirty-five members gathered from ages in the 80s to 3 months old. The Nazis said, ‘You’re coming with us.’ She said, ‘We’re not moving,’ and they machine-gunned every one of them dead. That’s what happens when you try to suck up to dictators. You can’t. Johnson has to learn that lesson,” Schumer said Sunday.
Schumer’s indirect call to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin came on the heels of his trip to Ukraine last week, in which he traveled with a congressional delegation to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.