Ocasio- Cortez trivializes the Holocaust

By H. Applebaum

H. Applebaum

SAN DIEGO –Although Rep. Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t understand it, most Jews do understand how inappropriate it is to compare our Southern border to a concentration camp. An editorial in Wednesday’s L.A.Times, however, supports Cortez’s allegation and does it in the name of the Jewish community. The writer identifies himself as a Jew to givemore credence to his false comparison.

Concentration camps were set up to provide slave labor and to eventually starve the workers to death. Concentration camps got their slaves by going into Jewish homes and villages, rounding the people up, then putting them on cattle cars to be sent hundreds of miles from home. We have all seen the pictures of the emaciated prisoners with the striped pajamas.
To those who would use a concentration camp comparison to make a point, one must ask: where is the slave labor, the starving people, the forced evacuations? Where are the piles of dead bodies stacked like logs? They are not on our border with Mexico.
Comparing a border facility to a concentration camp not only trivializes the suffering of millions of European Jews, tortured and murdered by the Nazis, it dishonors their memory.

 

Every Ashekenazi Jew alive today has relatives who were lost in the Holocaust, whether they know who they were or not. That is because half of all European Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Any Jew who thinks it is all right to make this comparison speaks only for themselves. Any news outlet that publishes such a comparison promulgates a very hurtful falsehood.

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Applebaum is a freelance writer based in San Diego.