{Originally posted to The Lid}
I have read about, discussed, and written about the Holocaust more in the past seven days than in the past seven years. It’s not only about AOC’s comments about Concentration Camps, but who agreed with her, who condemned her, and who didn’t have the guts to say anything.
A basic rule of American politics was broken too many times this past week– never use the Holocaust or any of its related terms such as Nazis or Hitler, for political warfare. The Holocaust is a singular event in world history and not just because of its scale and inhuman horror. Yes, there have been, and sadly will be other genocides of other groups, there have even been other atrocities against the Jewish people. But generally, a genocide is waged to suppress a group, keep them out of a countries politics, or to take their land or some other economic reason. The Holocaust was different– the Jews targeted by Hitler and the Nazis had no land and held relatively little power–they were just hated. The Nazis took Jews from all over Europe and killed them.
Other things that shouldn’t be used for comparison are things like slavery in America, and Apartheid. In their own unique way, they are also incomparable to anything else.
Thankfully nothing is being done by America or in America that is as close as being in the same universe as the Holocaust. That’s one of the reasons it doesn’t make sense to use it in a political comparison. It’s hyperbolic and demonstrates a lack of understanding or compassion for what happened during the Shoah (what the Holocaust is called in Hebrew). It also indicates a deficiency in intelligence that causes an absence of the verbal agility to produce a more accurate comparison.
It’s also a worthless argument that one can’t really win.
I’ve never seen a politician successfully convince another politician, pundit, or voter to come to their side with a tawdry Holocaust citation. Usually, when a politician makes an inappropriate Shoah reference purposely, they face criticism from the mainstream media and politicians from each of the two major media. They usually don’t get support for the inappropriate comparison. Last week was an exception.
In a now-famous incident, last Tuesday rookie member of Congress, Democratic Socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) also known as AOC, made a gaffe by comparing Concentration Camps to where the U.S. is housing illegal immigrant children. One of the places being used for the kids is Fort Sill, a 150-year-old U.S. Army base which was the home of The Army Ground Forces Air Training School, and still trains our military. Fort Sill was one of the locations hosting a Japanese Internment Camp which in itself was a horrible episode of American History. BTW those internment camps were not in the same neighborhood as the Nazi Concentration Camps. Fort Sill housed illegal immigrant children during the Obama administration, but no one complained. Neither the Obama or Trump administrations housed the children in the same part of the Fort where the Japanese Americans were held.
The kids are being kept in an array of locations across the country, because of the overwhelming influx of illegals sneaking across our border with Mexico and the lack of adequate funding by Congress to house them or even provide them beds as they (their attorneys) wait to present their asylum case to a judge. They are slow in delivering the funds because it gives them another topic to use against President Trump.
AOC began her comments with:
This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.
This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis ⬇️https://t.co/2dWHxb7UuL
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC)
Sorry Rep Ocasio-Cortez but I have a much better Holocaust expert and thinks your comparison is crap (but being a rabbi he said it much nicer)
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center/ The Wiesenthal Center’s mission includes Holocaust remembrance and fighting antisemitism. The center’s Holocaust museum, the Museum of Tolerance is the largest Holocaust Museum in the country, Which the good rabbi a real expert on the Holocaust. Rabbi Cooper wrote an op-ed for the Fox News website saying that AOC’s statement was absurd and insulting:
“President Trump’s policy of cracking down on illegal immigration on the border with Mexico and detaining some migrants is certainly a legitimate topic of debate. The conditions under which the migrants are being held can be debated as well. But comparing U.S. detention facilities operating today to the Nazi concentration camps where millions of innocent men, women, and children were tortured, starved, beaten and murdered during World War II in the Holocaust is breathtakingly absurd.”
“(…) The truth is that the burgeoning disaster at our southern border is not the result not of a monstrous plot by President Trump to build concentration camps, but of a real humanitarian crisis overwhelming the federal immigration bureaucracy and a deep and toxic national political divide.”
The Rabbi closed with a “Memo to politicians:”
“The images of incarcerated kids and adults who fled other countries desperately trying to gain entry into the U.S. should generate action – not false and incendiary rhetoric. It behooves a divided Congress to rediscover a bipartisan way to solve our immigration crisis, rather than using it for political warfare.”
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s concentration camp comments came out of the same general ignorance she has displayed ever since she came into prominence. In this case, it was joined by her ignorance of history and the Holocaust.
She may soon get the opportunity to learn what she doesn’t know…well at least what she doesn’t know about Concentration Camps. Two days after she made her inappropriate comment. Dominik Tarczynski, a member of the Polish Parliament, invited her to put her brain where her mouth is. He extended what he called an “olive branch of education,” inviting her to visit the worst of Hitler’s concentration camps in Poland so she can in learn the why it’s so wrong to inappropriately use the Holocaust for political purposes.
With this letter, I am formally inviting to come to Poland,where Adolf Hitler set up the worst chain of concentration camps the world has ever seen, so that she may see that scoring political points with enflamed rhetoric is unacceptable in our contemporary Western societies pic.twitter.com/ivOTfmiCfo
— TARCZYŃSKI Dominik (@D_Tarczynski)
AOC should have jumped at the chance, but as of this writing four days after the invitation, she has not answered Mr. Tarczynski.
In the end, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez asinine argument did not work. Oh, she is getting some support, but not because of people actually buy her comparison of our border facilities to concentration camps, but because the controversy surrounding them gave Democrats one more opportunity to trash the president. If her foolish use of the Holocaust made sense rather than being silent Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Kirsten Gillibrand would have taken the extra opportunity to slam to the President, and the Political Director of the most liberal of networks NBC wouldn’t have criticized AOC for making the statement and her fellow Dems for not slamming her comment.