Posted on 03/19/2012 5:13:39 AM PDT by Kaslin
Dear Mr. Friedman:
I am deeply disappointed by your refusal to speak with me personally about some remarks you make to my editors at TownHall.com. I have given you ample time to respond to my phone calls. Now, Im responding to you in this open letter. I really have no other choice given your unwillingness to speak directly to the people you target with your misguided condescension. Ill respond to your irresponsible remarks one paragraph at a time. Here goes:
Mike Adams is not the first person to draw an analogy between the Holocaust and abortion, but we wish he would be the last one. (Aborting Hitler, Mike Adams, January 30th).
In my column, I correctly referred to the Nazi Holocaust as a Holocaust. I correctly referred to the feminist Holocaust as a Holocaust. I did not deny or in any way minimize any Holocaust. I simply spoke of two instead of speaking of one. If you are anti-Holocaust, then why are you morally superior for talking about one less Holocaust than I do? I just dont understand your basic premise. Unfortunately, you will not pick up the phone to explain it to me when I call your office.
Referring to abortion as the "American Holocaust", makes for a catchy headline but it also undermines the historical truth of Nazi Germany, and Adams ought to know better. The Holocaust was the systematic industrialized murder of millions and should never translate into 2012 political analogies.
(Authors Note: The headline was Aborting Hitler not American Holocaust. Friedman is undermining the historical truth of what I have written. He ought to know better).
Now, I am even more confused. When I assert the truth of one Holocaust, how do I undermine the historical truth of another? Why cant both assertions be true particularly when I back those assertions with evidence? Furthermore, are you at all concerned that some of the unborn murdered in the womb are little Jewish children who cannot defend themselves? Have you no concern that Planned Parenthood is engaged in industrialized murder? Are you also denying the historical truth that the founder of Planned Parenthood was a eugenicist who subscribed to Nazi ideology? Can you not see the connection between the two? Or are you trying to re-write history like the Holocaust deniers you claim to oppose? These are all great questions you could answer if you would just pick the phone.
Adams is entitled to his views on abortion, but his attempt to assert a moral equivalency between abortion, and the murder of millions of people at the hands of Nazis, is not only offensive but is indicative of a lack of understanding about the Holocaust.
Now, I think I understand your position. You dont think the unborn are people. Well, what are they? Are you even prepared to offer an explanation of when a living fetus becomes a person?
Heres where I can help. There are exactly four reasons routinely given for denying the personhood of the unborn. They follow in no particular order of importance:
1. Size the unborn are smaller and therefore not persons;
2. Level of development the unborn are less developed and therefore not persons;
3. Environment the unborn are not persons because they are still in the womb;
4. Degree of dependency the unborn are not persons because they must depend on others for survival.
I have rebuttals to all of these argument but you do not seem interested in them. Nor did you seem to understand the basic premise of Aborting Hitler, which was to assert that the denial of personhood is the motivating force behind Holocausts in general. Because you didnt get it, now youre doing it. Do you get it now?
Sincerely,
David C. Friedman
Regional Director, Washington DC Regional Office
Anti-Defamation League
Finally, I must take exception to your decision to sign off using the word sincerely. You arent sincere. If you were sincere, you would take seriously the argument that the unborn are persons. Then, once you arrived at that conclusion, you would also conclude that abortion is a Holocaust. Abortion provides a clear example of the systematic industrialized murder of millions.
Unfortunately, you have become nothing more than a Holocaust denier. The fact that you work for ADL makes you a shameless hypocrite, as well. Of course, you are entitled to lecture someone who sees through your intellectual poverty and moral bankruptcy. But you ought to know better.
Authors Note: For more on the parallels between the Holocaust and abortion see Ray Comforts brilliant film 180. Click here to view it now. Unfortunately, the film has not been approved by the ADL. It never will be.
Respectfully disagree. The evil of the Nazi Holocaust was not in the killing of Jews, as such. It was in the killing of people. That the Nazis made a false distinction between Jews and all other human beings does not require us to accept their premise -- or to mimic it by saying the unborn aren't really people. They were killing people, period. We are doing the same.
You might want to reexamine WHY they were doing it. Not because they had studied up on the theology of Judaism and decided it was worthy of capital punishment. The evil motives were political and economic -- a diabolical hash of envy, scapegoating, greed and ignorance -- and all this had been brewing a long time in the German mind. Nazi politics, half-baked modernism, eugenics, 20th century science combined to make it a distinctive atrocity, but at base it was about killing people; murder. Our American Holocaust is of liberal politics, thoroughly baked modernism, eugenics and 20th century science. Redefine humanity to exclude Jews there; redefine humanity to exclude preborn babies here. Good Germans held their noses and knew nothing, good Americans do much the same, saying it's none of their business, it's between a woman and her doctor.
It's murder. In the millions.
Margaret Sanger did not put the idea in Hitler's heart.
Stalin, Hitler, Sanger, Mao, Pol Pot. She’s right up there with the worst.
From Galton come all the racial purity people who followed: Sanger, Hitler, Farrakhan, etc.
I never said she did.
I was rebutting someone else who claimed “The goal of abortion is not to kill all babies of only a particular race. “.
Margaret Sanger did want to kill all babies of a particular race.
'Whether I am correct,' is a construction that makes you the judge and jury. I'm not accepting that. Genocide was obviously the goal in the case of the Jews and while the killing included "undesirables" no similar program of public propaganda as regarded mass intent was directed at each of these groups.
Or would the government eliminating a similar number of families either to take their assets or simply because they would not conform to the new order be just as immoral?
It's not a matter of immorality, but whether they are the same intent. That's why we have the word, "genocide" instead of "mass murder." They're different.
Oh, and paragraphs are your friend.
I worry about the effect of insisting on genocide as a central element of the Holocaust's evil. While genocide was an additional element of evil in the Holocaust, I don't see a huge moral gap between Hitler's targeted mass murders of Jews, gays, Gypsies, Jehovahs Witnesses, and other "undesirables", and the less narrowly targeted but still horrifying mass murders committed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others who interpreted socialism as violently as Hitler did but included more diversity among their victims.
Well go ahead and worry. The sheer mass of propaganda directed against 'the Jew' was totally different than the others who got lumped in (I noted your omission of the infirm, retarded, and insane). If you want to lump the Jewish people in with them when the intent was clearly different, go ahead and you may even earn the distinction of a letter from Mr. Friedman someday to which you can reply similarly.
I'd considered that, but I'd bet you the farm that neither the average abortion doc nor his customers today are thinking about eugenics. As I said, the distinction is mass intent to destroy an ethnicity.
The knee-jerk “liberal” reaction is always to say Sanger was “taken out of context”.
It does when it comes to naming a historical event, not to evaluating whether or not it is evil. If you want to come up with similar term for abortion (which is advisable) then go for it.
You might want to reexamine WHY they were doing it.
Oh really? I take it you know all about the Sabbateans.
The evil motives were political and economic -- a diabolical hash of envy, scapegoating, greed and ignorance -
That was the pitch, but not the motive. I suggest you bone up on the three-hundred-year history that led to this particular genocide.
It's murder. In the millions.
Set intersection does not mean subset inclusion. They are both killings (murder being a legal term), but they are different. That's why we have had a word for "genocide" from long before the Shoah.
Understood, but he really stepped in this one because he got passionate and pushed it before checking with an Orthodox Jew as to what Friedman might be saying that he didn't know.
53+million babies, in America, alone! That is so mind-boggling, but our country wants to kill the person who brings the message about it, not the industry doing the killing.
Watch the movie, if you haven’t! I sent it to every friend via email.
Evidence shows that the origins of this term, as applied to the Jews, are neither cynical nor anti-Semitic.
The term 'holocaust' was used as early as 1852, to mean masses of people killed in a revolution; it was used in 1867 referring to all of the Africans horribly slaughtered in the name of European imperialism.
In 1943, in an ad taken out in the New York Times, the New Zionist Organization of America demands the establishment of a free, Jewish state in Palestine. They note that Jews around the world are fighting alongside the Allied forces in this "holocaust of blood and sweat and tears." This usage of holocaust refers more to the war in general rather than to the specific actions taken by the Nazis against the Jews.
The first mention of the holocaust to refer specifically to the slaughter of the Jews occurs in an obituary the deceased Benjamin Winter, who tirelessly worked on behalf of Polish Jewry. Written in 1944, this obituary decries the fact that the Jews were suffering immensely "during the present holocaust which has destroyed more than two millions of its number."
So for almost 100 years, English-speaking people have been using the word "holocaust" simply to mean atrocious slaughter or mass murder.
No irony, no anti-Semitism implies.
The same slaughter in mid-20th-century, when capitalized and using the definite article ("The Holocaust") means the same as "the Shoah," "the Churban" (a rare Yiddish usage) or "The Final Solution".
The term derives from a Greek word, "holokaustos" which means what I said it means. To apply it to a people slaughtered and burned in assembly line fashion, is cynical.
I'll just note that you wrote to Kaslin: " 'The holocaust' was a cynical invention of an anti-Semitic media. The correct word is 'Shoah,' which simply means 'disaster.' "
And to Pollster 1 you wrote: " 'Whether I am correct,' is a construction that makes you the judge and jury."
I find that mildly amusing, but then I haven't seen your copyright of the English language.
I suggest you bone up on the three-hundred-year history that led to this particular genocide.
Use of the word "holocaust" to refer to mass murder goes back as far. You might want to bone up on that.
You may have the last word. (Noblesse oblige!)
1) The killing of Jews by the Nazis -- You would call this "Shoah"?
2) The killing of Jews by the Nazis -- You do not like the term The Holocaust for this tragedy?
3) The abortion of babies as a widespread industry -- You do not like this to be called a holocaust?
Really trying to understand your expectations for how these terms are used.
It has nothing to do with my authority. If you have a problem with facts, too bad. "American Holocaust" is a crappy term. Wide use of it is a transgression. Christ taught you how to deal with that.
I find that mildly amusing, but then I haven't seen your copyright of the English language.
The word isn't originally English; it is Greek.
You may have the last word. (Noblesse oblige!)
Droit de siegneur. Use of the word "holocaust" to refer to mass murder goes back as far. You might want to bone up on that.
I said the term from which the word was "translated," so I suggest you bone up on your reading skills.
You may have the last word. (Noblesse oblige!)
Looks more like droit de seigneur.
The Orthodox already do.
2) The killing of Jews by the Nazis -- You do not like the term The Holocaust for this tragedy?
The Orthodox really don't.
3) The abortion of babies as a widespread industry -- You do not like this to be called a holocaust?
I doubt the Jewish people do. I respect their wishes on this one.
"Whether I am correct" was a construction intended to convey the idea that I had not thought this issue through completely and hoped to have a discussion on the question, not that I knew that I was correct and simply chose to humor you (if that is what you thought I meant).
The sheer mass of propaganda directed against 'the Jew' was totally different than the others who got lumped in (I noted your omission of the infirm, retarded, and insane).
My omission of those groups is probably parallel to your omission of communists, Poles, and some other groups that we both left out - an omission that I assume was triggered by the broad scope of the atrocities in Nazi Germany. Can you explain why the murder of more than six million innocent people, primarily entire families, is much worse when genocide and racial purity are part of the motivation than when political purity suffices to identify the victims for systematic mass extermination of "undesirables" and their entire families? [If you'll excuse a little snark, and a long paragraph, "Can you explain why" is a construction that invites you to be not quite the judge and jury but at least the prosecuting/defense attorney.]
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