Pope Francis on Saturday called on world governments to let refugees out of their “concentration camps.” He meant “refugee centers.”
A week ago or so, White House spokesman Sean Spicer called Nazi concentration camps “Holocaust centers.” Is a pattern emerging?
The Pope made his comment at the Basilica of St. Bartholomew in Rome during a service for modern-day Christian martyrs. Speaking to refugees from Lebanon, he recalled his visit last year to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, where one of them told him that Islamist fanatics had slashed his Christian wife’s throat for holding on to her crucifix.
“I don’t know if he managed to leave that concentration camp,” the Pope added, suggesting today’s refugee camps are reminiscent of the WW2 concentration camps “because of the great number of people left there inside them.”
American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris criticized Pope Francis, noting that “the conditions in which migrants are currently living in some European countries may well be difficult, and deserve still greater international attention, but concentration camps they certainly are not.”
Harris set the record straight, explaining that “the Nazis and their allies erected and used concentration camps for slave labor and the extermination of millions of people during World War II. There is no comparison to the magnitude of that tragedy.”
President Trump announced he would like to meet Pope Francis when he visits Europe next month, but it isn’t clear whether the feelings are mutual. In February, 2016, the Pope rebuked Trump, saying that “a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” Trump responded by calling the Pope “disgraceful.”
Then, evoking memories of the crusades, Trump assured his audience that “if and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened.”