Border jumpers in detention.
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Jewish youngsters in Auschwitz.
Posted on 06/20/2018 6:09:50 AM PDT by SJackson
Are comparisons between the current US policy of family separation at the border and concentration camps valid?
The photos are gut-wrenching and the audio is heartbreaking. For the past several weeks, the US government has been separating families arriving at the US-Mexican border, imprisoning the parents and detaining the traumatized and often bewildered children.
As the public debate over this issue reaches deafening levels, it is no surprise that comparisons to Nazi Germany are rampant.
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Over the weekend, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA, posted a photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau on Twitter, writing: “Other governments have separated mothers and children.”
Later that day, he posted the photo again, adding: “NO ONE who now walks through that portal on that siding can casually believe that civilized behavior is guaranteed.”
Asked about the tweet on Monday during a CNN TV interview, Hayden said he has visited the site of the concentration camp several times, and chose the photo as the specific location where families arriving were separated.
“I know we’re not Nazi Germany, alright,” he said on Monday. “But there is a commonality there, and a fear on my part – that we have standards we have to live up to.”
US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions – considered among those responsible for the policy – was asked about such comparisons during an appearance on Fox News on Monday.
“It’s a real exaggeration, of course,” Sessions said. “In Nazi Germany they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country.”
Sessions, clearly not a student of history, has been heavily criticized for that statement.
For years the Nazis worked to encourage and force emigration of German Jews.
It is not particularly shocking to hear Nazi imagery invoked in discussions of the highly controversial policy. Godwin’s Law dictates that just about any heated argument will end with a reference to Hitler.
But this isn’t just any argument. The United States government is deliberately wrenching apart families who arrive at the border, traumatizing young children and their parents. Many of the children are being kept behind chain-link fences in facilities in Texas, California, Florida and other locations.
While shouting “Hitler” at any political opponent is rarely an effective tool, many of the comparisons drawn here have a strong basis. Nazi officers did separate families, and did tear children away from their parents. Detaining children behind chainlink fences is dehumanizing and cruel way to treat anyone, and dehumanization was a key element in the Nazi campaign against the Jews.
And the majority of mainstream Jewish groups have not been silent on the issue, with most issuing a broad condemnation of the Trump administration policy. But almost none have invoked Holocaust imagery.
The Anti-Defamation League – and 25 other Jewish organizations – condemned the policy in a letter to Sessions last week, calling it “unconscionable.”
The Simon Weisenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper said Tuesday that, “Outrage can be expressed at separating children of asylum seekers without misappropriating Auschwitz, gas chambers and the Nazi Holocaust when 1.5 million Jewish children were systematically and brutally murdered.”
And Commentary editor John Podhoretz also chimed in, tweeting on Monday: “Stop already with the Nazi and Hitler analogies.
Really. Stop. What’s happening is its own kind of bad and you court discrediting the seriousness of your complaints about it by overstating things so tastelessly and wrongly.”
But Jewish US Senator Dianne Feinstein, appearing on MSNBC on Monday, slammed the policy, saying, “This is the United States of America. It isn’t Nazi Germany, and there’s a difference. And we don’t take children from their parents – until now. And I think it’s such a sad day.”
The Nazis scapegoated, traumatized and dehumanized Jews and other groups. But they also methodically enslaved and murdered millions of people – including at least 1.5 million children. The White House is not – nor do I believe it is working toward – carrying out systematic extermination.
But by arguing over the validity of such comparisons, detractors of the policy are obfuscating the issue. The callous decision to tear apart families as means of a deterrent should be horrifying on its own, without any need to equate. And those who see echoes of 1930s Germany should be buoyed by one stark difference: public outrage.
While average Germans and Poles were at best indifferent to the treatment of Jews, the average American finds this policy immoral and outrageous. The national media and a slew of elected officials from both parties have been actively condemning the separation of families.
You don’t need Holocaust imagery to express horror and fury at a policy of deliberately separating children from their parents. In the year 2018, it is a uniquely heinous act.
Fake News
Next week, they will have something different to be outraged about.
Border jumpers in detention.
Jewish youngsters in Auschwitz.
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Hayden said he has visited the site of the concentration camp several times, and chose the photo as the specific location where families arriving were separated. “I know we’re not Nazi Germany, alright,” he said on Monday. “But there is a commonality there, and a fear on my part – that we have standards we have to live up to.”
Thank you general Hayden. Most people would agree that separating children from their parents, even criminal parents, is painful. As is separating parents from their children prior to murdering them. Most people would recognize separation for the purpose of murder as an evil. And in no way comparable to separation for legal reasons, pertaining to the protection of the children.
Most, not all. Murdering Jewish children vs separating children until their parents are released from detention. Same thing. After all, to some Jewish life is very cheap. This seems to be a position of not just the radical left and many on the radical "right", but mainstream leftists.
.....but wait, there's more Democrat wisdom.......from a Yale graduate, no less..
One would have to be a certifiable lunatic to make any comparison.
It’s absurd and laughable.
Build the WALL !! All the WALL.. the haulacsust was when obozo induced 700,000 minors and illegal aliens into our nation and hid them!! The cost to taxpayer for these separated children was 35k annually. Arrest obozo!!
Absolutely! I hope POTUS stands strong and this more than anything else proves we must have a big beautiful Wall!
You want to see a holocaust, wait until the borders the leftists destroyed are redrawn world wide.
FOX News anchors going all on siding with the liberals on immigration. Lewindowski on Fox right now and the anchor is grilling him just like you’d expect out of a slanted NYT reporter.
The hate filled fake news media is hyping up their Left-Wing followers and their heads are literally exploding.
You want to see a holocaust, just look at the situation developing in South Africa.
Ridiculous.
Three parties are responsible: 1) Parents, if they have any; 2) Their national governemnts; 3) The governments allowing them transit to the US Border, principally Mexico.
This has nothing to do with me or with my people. My gut is not wrenched, my heart is not broken.
How dare Amy Spiro suggest otherwise?
HE SURVIVED NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS – HIS MESSAGE ON BORDER SECURITY WILL SILENCE THE MEDIA
http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/19/survived-nazi-concentration-camps-message/
The better comparison is to U.S. immigration policy before and after World War II. Most Jewish asylum seekers and refugees were excluded. My own mother was held for 10 days at Ellis island while her mother was allowed to search for a sponsor in New York. She got one but they had to leave the U.S. for Cuba in order to reapply.
They may pull on heart strings today but I promise in a very short time they will not be so cute. As my mother would say, when I would beg for a kitten, "the problem with kittens is that they turn into cats"
The problem with cute fuzzy dreamers is that they turn into this:
They’ll gratuitously compare that to the Holocaust, too.
Michael Hayden needs the be bludgeoned bloody. He has disgraced himself as a former member of the military, as an American, and as a human being.
The reason children were separated at the extermination camps was often to either send them for ghastly "medical experiments," or straight to the gas chambers.
I grew up knowing survivors of those camps, and I wish a few were alive today, to look him in the eye and tell Hayden what a despicable scumbag he is.
Mark
This just proves that Feinstein HATES American citizens, and much prefers illegal aliens to her own constituents.
I don't recall ever hearing her say these sort of things when American children are removed from their parents, for instance, when a single mother is arrested, and the child is sent to foster care. Not a peep from anyone on the left. Because the left HATE Americans.
Mark
The Party prefers illegal immigrants over white, Christian, heterosexual males.
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