Free Republic

Shortened title. Full title: Academics Rally Behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Over Concentration Camp Comments: 'She Is Completely Historically Accurate' Freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continued to spar with Republicans over her claim that U.S. migrant detention centers are "concentration camps" over the weekend. Ocasio-Cortez blasted Iowa representative Steve King Sunday after he asked her to visit the site of Nazi death camp Auschwitz with a Holocaust memorial group. Declining his invite, she pointed out King had met with a far-right Austrian group during his own trip to the camp, as The Washington Post noted last October. Ocasio-Cortez described migrant detention facilities at...

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum released a statement Monday rejecting comparisons between migrant detention centers in the United States and the events that took place in the early 20th century. “The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other event, whether historical or contemporary,” the Museum stated. “That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now.” The Museum continued: “[A] statement ascribed to a Museum staff historian regarding recent attempts to analogize the situation on...

Over the weekend a memorial was held at the Treblinka concentration camp to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the 1943 uprising at the camp. Roughly 875,000 people were murdered in Treblinka during the Holocaust, nearly all of them Jews. In 1943 prisoners rebelled. While most were killed, several hundred managed to escape, and the uprising damaged the camp badly enough to slow the mass murder at the site. Deputy Minister of Education Avi Wortzman represented Israel at the ceremony. In his speech, he spoke about the horror of the Holocaust, and also replied to an Arab-Israeli MK’s recent claim, in...

A Liberal Democrat MP in Britain faces expulsion from the party for saying Jews had not learned from the murder of six million in the Holocaust in their treatment of Palestinian Authority Arabs, the Daily Mail reports. David Ward, MP for Bradford East, wrote on his own website that he was “saddened” that Jews “could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians…on a daily basis.” “Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution...

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) Monday criticized the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to pave the way for the beatification of his controversial war-time predecessor Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), who was pontiff of the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958. Benedict XVI's signature on the document certifying Eugenio Pacelli's (religiously defined) "heroic virtues" over the weekend came as a surprise since the pope's decision to move his World War II-era predecessor, Pius XII, a step nearer sainthood was taken less than a month before the pontiff's planned visit to Rome's main synagogue. "As long as the archives of Pope Pius...

I'm a 5th grade catechist at my church and I have a class of a dozen children. Almost all of them are products of the public chool system; one is a special needs child and another is Monteressori schooled. During yesterday's class we encountered Corrie ten Boom, via our discussion oriented text books. The subject of the the lesson was "Forgiveness". As I waded into the discussion one of my students asked me what the Holocaust was. I sat back for a moment then asked one of the other students to contribute an answer. I was a little shocked when...

HOW DO we even begin to measure the degree of crassness embodied in Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s failure to show up at Wednesday’s Days of Remembrance Holocaust Observance at the Old State Capitol? There simply is no metric for an act of omission that so clearly demonstrates this governor’s lack of respect for so many things: for those who planned and participated in Wednesday’s event, for the history it represents, for the very office that he holds. The Holocaust observance is a 27-year tradition that, until 2004, always had featured the governor in attendance. Blagojevich missed it in 2004 because he...

BERLIN (AP) — A 55-nation group of European and North American countries on Thursday denounced "new forms and expressions" of anti-Semitism and rejected any attempt to justify them on the basis of strife in the Middle East. In a final declaration, the governments unanimously condemned "all attacks motivated by anti-Semitism or by any other forms of religious or racial hatred or intolerance, including attacks against synagogues and other religious places, sites and shrines." U.S. and German delegates welcomed the document as a strong, timely denunciation of anti-Semitism and a pledge by each member to combat hate crimes against Jews. The...