Sunday, July 28, 2019

Jewish ideas about concentration camps

From an LA Times op-ed:
We live in a country where people are being held in concentration camps.

I’m Jewish; I do not use the term “concentration camp” lightly. ... I stand with every Jew who has begun to say loudly and directly that “never again” is now. ...

Concentration camps, historian Andrea Pitzer has written, have a long, precise lineage. “Mass detention without trial,” she explained recently in the New York Review of Books, “earned a new name and a specific identity at the end of the nineteenth century. The labels then adopted for the practice were ‘reconcentración’ and ‘concentration camps’ — places of forced relocation of civilians into detention on the basis of group identity.”

If that doesn’t define what’s happening at the border, what does? ...

Eighty years ago, in Germany, I would not have been allowed to write this in a newspaper.
No, that does not define what is happening. Some migrants are being let in, some are being turned away, and some are being detained. No civilians are being inconvenienced in any way. No one is being punished on the basis of group identity.

The USA is being invaded by migrants. Jews and Jewish organizations overwhelmingly support the invasion.

I don't know whether his opinion would have been allowed in Germany 80 years ago, but today Germany and most of Europe does forbid these opinions that trivialize the Jewish Holocaust. He acknowledges that rabbis very much disapprove of these Holocaust comparisons.

If the author is really concerned about free speech, he should direct his comments to Jews and Jewish organizations. They are the source of most censorship today. The latest is that they have blocked using the keyword "Christian" on YouTube. And if he is concerned about border enforcement, he could complain about Israel.

I post this as an example of how Jews think. No one else makes such arguments.

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