It is scandalous that Jewish organizational leadership, outside the ranks of political activists, has largely ignored the Harris campaign’s careful and ever so clever efforts to create an image of Donald Trump as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. And it is not only that they seized upon and exploited the uncorroborated comments of a disgruntled Trump White House chief of staff, although they certainly did that too.
More fundamentally, even remotely suggesting that there was any equivalence between one’s mere political opponent and the author of the incomprehensible horrors of the Holocaust distorts their historicity and that of their victims.
John F. Kelly is a 45-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps who rose to the ranks of Four-Star General on the road to becoming President Donald Trump’s chief of staff. He is the picture of the gruff, hard-driving, no-nonsense soldier who evolved from someone who took orders, into someone who gave them.
We can only speculate, but we cannot imagine that there was perfect harmony between Kelly and the at least equally hard-driving Trump – also used to giving orders.
At all events, several weeks ago Kelly was interviewed by The New York Times and claimed that Trump had supposedly made statements like “Hitler did some good things too” and that he “wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had…who will be loyal to him personally.” Kelly also opined that Trump fit his definition of “fascist” for his right wing and autocratic bent.
But nowhere did Kelly equate Trump with Hitler. Yet the story was spun in the Harris-compliant media as if he had and it went viral. And from Ms. Harris on down, no one in her camp did anything to tamp down the leap. To the contrary, she underscored it: “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is.”
However, Jewish leaders did not rise in protest. Nor did Jewish leadership seem to care when fellow traveling Democrat political PACs took out ads comparing Trump to Hitler. Like the ad showing three clips in rapid succession of Hitler giving a speech, Nazis marching with flags bearing swastikas and Hitler giving the Nazi salute. A voice is then heard saying “History shows what happens when leaders use hate to consolidate power.” Then Trump is shown in a heavily edited video clip as saying – totally out of context, we might add – “I’m going to be a dictator.”
Our leaders were also largely unheard from when several Democrat campaign groups took to analogizing a massive Trump campaign rally in Madison Square to a 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden, seemingly because of the similarity in the size of both.
Nor was there an uproar when MSNBC edited in clips of a Ku Klux Klan rally into clips of the Trump rally while it was going on, which served to liken Trump to a “fascist” leader and the rally “something out of Hitler’s playbook,” as reported by Fox News.
Of particular note was what MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart said on the air: accompanying the clips: “But that [Trump] jamboree is happening right now. You see it there on your screen in that place, is particularly chilling because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the Garden for a so-called pro-American rally.”
We had rather thought that this sort of thing was beyond the pale by any measure. Yet the leaders of our vaunted Jewish organizations said nothing. But they should have. Politics should not always be politics.
