What was the King-Crane Commission of 1919?
Following the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was dissatisfied with the secret diplomacy of the Great Powers, wishing instead to follow a doctrine of national self-determination. Wilson proposed an Inter-Allied commission to visit the Middle East to determine what the people living there wanted: independence, supervision under the proposed League of Nations Mandate system, or other proposals. He appointed Henry Churchill King, president of Oberlin College, and Charles R. Crane, Chicago businessman and trustee of Robert College in Constantinople, to serve as the American representatives. Although the full commission never assembled due to French and British opposition, the American team, known as the King-Crane Commission, visited the area from June to August 1919.
Dr. Henry Churchill King was a well known American educator, the president of Oberlin College and the author of numerous volumes on theology, education and philosophy. During 1918-1919 he was director of religious work for the YMCA in France prior to joining the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey, now known as the King-Crane Commission.
Charles R. Crane was a wealthy American Arabist, a philanthropist who had business knowledge of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. His heavy contributions to Wilson's 1912 campaign led to being named to the 1917 Special Diplomatic Commission to Russia, service as a member of the American Section of the Paris Peace Conference, and the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey in 1919 that now bears his name. Crane later helped finance the first explorations for oil in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and was American Ambassador to China from May 1920 to June 1921.
The Commission's work covered all of what had been the Turkish empire in the Middle East, not just Syria (which then included today's Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the disputed territories.) The well-known anti-Zionist predilections of Crane colored the testimony and made its credibility somewhat doubtful. Any question of his objectivity in Palestine was settled by his admiration for Hitler's Germany -- Crane called the Third Reich "the real political bulwark of Christian culture" -- and his approval of Stalin's anti-Jewish purges in Soviet Russia. His biographer described his later life as dominated by:
- "... a most pronounced prejudice...his unbridled dislike of Jews." Crane "tried...to persuade ...President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to shun the counsels of Felix Frankfurter and to avoid appointing other Jews to government posts." Crane "envisioned a world-wide attempt on the part of the Jews to stamp out all religious life and felt that only a coalition of muslims and Roman Catholics would be strong enough to defeat such designs."
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Pure Zionist bullshit. The King-Crane report predicted, quite accurately, that a Jewish state could only be implemented in Syria-Palestine by force and that, were this done, the result would be thepermanent inflamement of the area. The report stands vindicated by subsequent events.
Your effort to pretend that the opinions of the Arabs of Syria-Palestine were determined by the anti-Semitic prejudices of Messrs. King and Crane is ludicrous. As the Commisioners stated in paragraph (1) of the section of their report entitled “Zionism” they actually were pre-disposed in favor of Zionism before the facts on the ground changed their minds. Do you suppose that no one can actually check the language of the report against your prevarications? Or is your name simply Joan Peters? (“From Bullshit Immemorial”)
we have all seen the resulf of the balfour declaration jihad after jihad thank you