A disgusting practice of pundits and other commentators and reporters is to make inappropriate comparisons between a modern news story and the Shoah (Shoah is the word Jews use for the Holocaust; it’s Hebrew for disaster).
Lately, those comparisons are being made about Donald Trump. Whether or not one supports Trump, comparing him to Hitler or any other Nazi is not only inappropriate, but it also cheapens the memory of the Holocaust horrors and displays a lack of acuity in the English language of those who cannot find the accurate words to describe the situation to their readers.
On Tuesday, MRCTV's Scott Whitlock reported:
Both ABC and NBC on Tuesday hyped the comparison of Donald Trump to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Today co-host Savannah Guthrie noted that the businessman has asked crowds to take a loyalty oath. Reporter Peter Alexander reminded, “One prominent Jewish leader comparing the loyalty gesture from the Trump audience to a Nazi salute.” Guthrie pressed, “I wonder how you feel about that comparison and whether it would make you want to perhaps not do it anymore, if people feel that way?”
The Trump/Holocaust references are not new. Last week, Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of ‘The American Prospect,’ compared Trump's populism to that of Hitler's in The Huffington Post:
Hitler, calling for the golden-haired resurgence of a racially pure, Nordic German Reich, was a swarthy Austrian. Das macht nichts (no problem). More importantly, Hitler was seen as the avenger of the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty and the economic destitution afflicting much of Germany. He vowed to make Germany great again (sound familiar?). That the particulars were an incoherent jumble didn't matter either. He was the man of the hour.
Newsweek asked if Trump was a fascist like Franco, Mussolini, or Hitler:
Since World War II, the ideology he represents has usually lived in dark corners, and we don’t even have a name for it anymore. The right name, the correct name, the historically accurate name, is fascism. I don’t use that word as an insult only. It is accurate.
Though hardly anyone talks about it today, we really should. It is still real. It exists. It is distinct. It is not going away. Trump has tapped into it, absorbing unto his own political ambitions every conceivable resentment (race, class, sex, religion, economic) and promising a new order of things under his mighty hand.
You would have to be hopelessly ignorant of modern history not to see the outlines and where they end up. I want to laugh about what he said, like reading a comic-book version of Franco, Mussolini or Hitler.
No matter what you think of the candidate as a possible president, any comparison of Trump to Nazis, Hitler, or fascists is disgusting because they aren't true, and more importantly, they cheapen the suffering of those who suffered through the Holocaust - some of whom were my relatives.
The way one proves the comparison is inappropriate is to answer a few questions.
Does Donald Trump tattoo numbers on people's arms?
Hitler chose that method of identifying my relatives and other victims because tattooing is prohibited in the Jewish faith. If Trump never forced people to tattoo numbers on their arms, then he probably isn’t Hitler.
I never met some of my family because the Nazis killed them and buried them in mass graves or cremated their bodies (cremation is also against Jewish Law). Did Trump kill people, cremate their remains, and bury them in mass graves?
Since Trump never killed, cremated, and buried people in mass graves, then anyone calling Trump a Nazi is ignorant of what Nazis really did.
Do the people who call Trump a Nazi think the billionaire had artificial legs recycled after his victims were stripped naked and gassed? Or that he pulled out the gold fillings from dead people's teeth, or cut off the hair of the dead to make wigs?
Even if one thinks Donald Trump is the worst politician who ever lived and that you would never vote for him even if someone put a gun to your head, there is not the slightest proof that Trump did the horrible things that Hitler and the Nazis did to millions of people.
In fact, not one of the Republican candidates ever forced people to put tattoos on their arms or crowded them into death camps where they would suffer torture until they were gassed, shot, or died some other horrible death, then had their corpses mutilated and parts that could be reused removed.
Until Trump, Republicans, or any other person alive does any of the horrible things that Hitler and the Nazis did, a comparison to them is not only false and inappropriate, but it trivializes the memory of the people who suffered during the Holocaust and the efforts of those who try to honor their memories.