On May 23, 1939, a shipload of 925 Jews, including families with small children, some of them toddlers, left the port of Hamburg for Cuba. They were grateful to be escaping Nazi discrimination. Though every one of them carried a visa for Cuba, none were admitted. The ship, the St. Louis, then turned its prow toward America, hoping to find a safe harbor there. Instead, they found that door closed as well. Michael Barak, one of the small children aboard the ship, described the U.S. “welcome” at a 2002 reunion of those passengers in Jerusalem:

When approaching Miami of the “free” country, President Roosevelt sent the U.S. navy to prevent any entry. On top of that, he warned any country in the region from letting any of the “damned” Jews to land safely on their soil. In Canada, the head of immigration said, after being asked how many Jews of that ship could be accepted, “None is too many.”

The ship sailed along the coast of Florida for five days, as its captain did what he could to find an open door somewhere in the world. In all, three weeks were spent trying to find refuge. Urgent cables were sent to every level of the U.S. government, including two personal appeals to President Roosevelt. No reply was forthcoming. Instead, Coast Guard boats patrolled to prevent anyone from swimming to shore. On June 7, the St. Louis was forced to set sail back across the Atlantic, where it was able to disembark its precious cargo between England, Holland, France, and finally Belgium. Of the passengers aboard the St. Louis, most of the families were separated when the Nazis took control of Holland, Belgium, and France the following year (1940). About 260 were deported immediately to killing centers, and nearly half of them died in the Holocaust.

The president’s inaction regarding the St. Louis caused a change of heart among some of his supporters, who felt that Roosevelt bore some responsibility for the devastating tragedy. It would be a visit from a Polish diplomat, Jan Karski, that would provide even more evidence of the chief executive’s lack of sympathy for the plight of European Jews. Karski was dispatched to London and to Washington to deliver a firsthand account of the atrocities being visited on the Jewish people. He met first with Justice Felix Frankfurter who, though not convinced, took Karski to the White House to meet with Roosevelt. Karski reported to the president:

There is no exaggeration in the accounts of the plight of the Jews. Our underground authorities are absolutely sure that the Germans are out to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. Reliable reports from our own informers give us the figure of 1,800,000 Jews already murdered in Poland up to the day when I left the country.

Karski later gave a firsthand report of the president’s response to his plea: “You will tell your leaders that we shall win this war. You will tell them that the guilty ones will be punished for their crimes. You will tell them that Poland has a friend in this house.”  Roosevelt then changed the subject and moved on to the next topic for discussion. His wife, Eleanor, said this about the way her husband dealt with unpleasant things: “If something was unpleasant and he didn’t want to know about it, he just ignored it. He always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough, it would settle itself.”

In an article for Yahoo! Voices, Brandon Moran summarized Paper Walls, a book by author David Wyman. Brandon wrote:  “The ‘Paper Wall’ around Central Europe in the summer and fall of 1940 slowed the migration of Germans into the U.S. dramatically. This wall consisted of stringent legislation and policy passed during this period, tightening the strangle hold on immigration into the U.S. Avra Warren played a large role in doing so. Warren worked to raise legislation for stricter immigration controls. His goal was to protect the country from subversive aliens. The new legislation suspended temporary immigration because temporary immigrants could have subversive connections or intentions. Warren and Assistant Secretary of State, Breckinridge Long, devised a modus operandi that effectively walled out any applicants the State Department wished to exclude.”

In June, Ayatollah Khamenei will mark 35 years as Iran’s Supreme Leader.  He succeeded the radical Islamist Ayatollah Khomeini when the first leader of the Islamic Republic died of cancer in 1989.  Like the rest of Iran’s power structure, Khamenei is a “twelver.”  This branch of Shi’a Islam believes that the twelfth descendant of Mohammad, called the mahdi, will be revealed to earth following an apocalyptic war and place the entire world under submission to Islam.

The current Supreme Leader was born in Najaf in 1939 to Seyyed Javad Khamenei and Khadijeh Mirdamadi, the second of eight children. Khamenei’s education began at the age of four when he began studying the Quran.  The following years were consumed with studies at seminary, but as with many other clerics of that time, Khamenei was far more involved with politics than religious scholarship. His tutelage to lay the foundation for his rule in Iran was provided by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself, the ultimate radical Islamic teacher. The developing grand ayatollah attended classes overseen by Khomeini, who taught a politicized version of Shi’a Islam in Qom, a holy site southwest of Tehran.

Khamenei’s life has not been without hazards and hitches. He was purportedly detained by the Iranian authorities several times during the reign of the shah of Iran. He barely avoided a targeted murder attempt in June 1981 by the Mujahedin-e Khalq, (or MEK, an exiled radical group that promotes the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran). A bomb hidden in a tape recorder placed on the lectern during salat al-jumu’ah, the Friday prayer service at a mosque, exploded.  Khamenei suffered wounds to his right arm, vocal chords, and lungs.  His right arm was paralyzed as a result of the attack, an impediment he will suffer for the remainder of his life.  When the recorder was later examined, a note was found inside that read, “A gift of Furqan Group to Islamic republic.” Furqan, a Shi’a militant group formed by the Iranian opposition, observed an anti-clerical Islamist dogma. It was said to have been responsible for the assassination of several senior officials in the country. Following the arrests and executions of its hierarchy, it was disbanded.

Author Reza Kahlili wrote of Khamenei’s rise in Iranian politics: “I had heard…that Ali Khamenei regularly came to…review the troops, and he was at least as much of a zealot about raising the flag of Islam across the world as Imam Khomeini. It was during this conflict [the Iraq war] that we learned that he believed we must continue to wage war until we destroyed all non-believers. Ali Khamenei also wanted Jerusalem and the return of one of the most sacred mosques and holiest places to Muslims, the Masjid al-Aqsa.”

Ali Khamenei soon found himself in the company of Khomeini’s inner circle. The younger cleric was quickly elevated to the post of deputy defense minister in the ayatollah’s government. Over the next decade, Khamenei surfaced in a number of governmental positions—Friday Prayers Iman, vice minister of national defense, and supervisor of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. His ties to the Guards have afforded him protection from his opposition at times.  The cleric and his wife, Khojaste Bagherzadeh, have four sons and two daughters.

Khemenei holds the highest position in Iran, both political and religious. He rules the military, legal system, media, and all strategic administrative bodies. His hold over the Guardian Council, the most controlling of all governmental entities, is absolute by virtue of his ability to appoint half of the Shi’a imams on the board. The other six individuals on the council are appointed by judges and approved by the Iranian parliament.

“No Right to Exist”

In 2015, Ayatollah Khamenei published a 400-page book called Palestine, which laid out his vision for the future of the Middle East. In no uncertain terms, Khamenei called for a single Muslim state to occupy all of the land of Israel to be ruled under Islamic sharia law. At the very beginning of the book, Khamenei declared that “ISRAEL HAS NO RIGHT TO EXIST AS A NATION.”

The book, which labels Israel as an enemy, lays out a specific plan to destroy the Jewish state. Khamenei says he does not support conventional “classical war” against Israel but rather calls for an escalating series of terror attacks that will drive the Jewish people to seek safety by fleeing from Israel.