I’m Not The Only One

by Daniel Cuevas

Originally published on Political Storm on March 5, 2007.

At least once in our lives, we’ve heard someone make a comparison between a Nazi or Adolph Hitler and an undesirable person. Maybe we were the people who made that comparison. It was usually about a nasty or even sadistic teacher or boss or someone we felt was at least as mean as a Nazi.
But what I’m talking about is more than a comparison. Rather, it was raised as a blatant exploitation of the Jewish Holocaust, when activists use it to gain sympathy for their cause. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which funds all local Public Housing Authorities, administers a this law under which any able-bodied person living in public housing, if they are not employed or in school full-time, must perform 90 hours a month of community service, such as landscaping or maintenance of public housing property.
Last year I covered a press conference in which several New York City Council members and their Congressional colleagues came out to denounce this forced labor regulation for pubic housing residents. One activist at the conference, Raymond Normandeau, distributed flyers which conveyed a connection between this law and the Nazi concentration camps, in which European Jews were forced to work in harsh conditions until their eventual executions. I asked Mr. Normandeau if he felt he had made an accurate comparison, and he simply said, “Sure, there’s no difference.”
No difference between making public housing residents sweep up litter or trim hedges 90 hours a month and forcing an entire group of people to work 60 to 70 hours a week just to be rewarded with their own extermination? Public housing residents are threatened with eviction if they don’t satisfy their forced labor requirement, but at the end of their service, they get to go home, not be thrown into an oven and cremated. While I do agree with Mr. Normandeau about the unfairness of the law, the comparison he made between that and a Nazi concentration camp was tasteless.
I rolled my eyes as those protesting the Republican National Convention or the war in Iraq deflated the integrity of their own arguments by publicly comparing President George W. Bush to Hitler. I’ve even seen hardcore liberals bearing everything from signs to buttons to bumper stickers likening our President to Der Fuhrer.
Overseas, people are not hesitant to make this comparison either. In a recent trip to Canada, President Bush was greeted by protesters, some of whom bore signs reading, “BUSH = HITLER.” I’ve seen these same kinds of signs used in other parts of the world, including Europe. You would think Europeans would have better sense than to compare anyone to Hitler, as their own grandparents got a front row seat (and in some cases, a seat on the stage) as Hitler and his Nazi forces rampaged through much of the European continent.
I am no fan of President Bush; but to be fair, the connection between George Bush and Adolph Hitler is as fictional as the one linking Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden - and far less plausible. While most tyrants are known for invading neighboring or even faraway lands and for denying basic rights to their citizens, Hitler is set far apart from such people like Napoleon, Joseph Stalin and even Saddam Hussein because Hitler killed 10 million people (six million Jews, four million non-Jews) in a systematic genocidal Holocaust which had never been seen in the modern world.
You can call Bush Napoleon, you can call him Stalin. Hell, just for ironic fun you could even call him Saddam Hussein. But until Bush starts commanding the military to shove six million Iraqis into ovens or gas chambers, he just doesn’t hold a candle to the Kaiser. For the most part, I never really had a problem with the invocation of Hitler or anything else Nazi-related. I felt that I should be happy to live in a country where people are free to make such stupid comparisons.
But, last week a friend brought a story to my attention that really made me stop, think and decide that perhaps we should give the old Nazi/Hitler comparison game a rest.
I learned that Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip were protesting their government’s call for them to withdraw from the Gaza Strip by wearing Nazi-style badges bearing the Star of David on their arms to compare this withdrawal to the expulsion of European Jews to Nazi death camps during Hitler’s reign. (During that era, European Jews were forced to wear these kinds of armbands and badges at all times.)
I find this thoughtless act very ironic considering that Israel is home to over 250,000 Holocaust survivors in a nation of 4 or 5 million. Thankfully, this irresponsible, grossly inaccurate and demeaning show of stupidity has brought down a hailstorm of criticism from Israeli officials and people who-gasp-actually know what the Holocaust was like and, unlike these moronic settlers, can tell the difference between what they went through and what the Israeli government wants the settlers to do. After all, the settlers are going back to Israel, not Auschwitz.
Members of Israel’s Parliament, even those who opposed the withdrawal of Israeli settlers, were appalled by the exploitation of the Holocaust to express their discontent. Israel’s Holocaust survivor community also blasted the protesters. Luckily, the morons have gotten the message and have agreed to stop wearing Nazi-style badges. Ironically, some Israeli government officials are now comparing those protesters who wore the Nazi badges to people who deny the Holocaust ever happened as their reprehensible act almost questions the seriousness of the Holocaust.
I do believe in the freedom to protest, but the exploitation of the Holocaust to gain sympathy for causes which do not merit such sympathy or to demonize a public figure needs to end. It not only cheapens and trivializes the experience and memory of millions of Holocaust victims and survivors, but it is an insult to the millions of Allied soldiers who fought against the Nazis. If the Jewish Holocaust means anything to us, we should all think twice before invoking the memory of the people who made it happen.