{"id":80,"date":"2008-10-28T09:32:17","date_gmt":"2008-10-28T09:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/cityofbrass\/2008\/10\/barack-obama-is-not-hitler.html"},"modified":"2008-10-28T09:32:17","modified_gmt":"2008-10-28T09:32:17","slug":"barack-obama-is-not-hitler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/2008\/10\/barack-obama-is-not-hitler.html","title":{"rendered":"Barack Obama is not Hitler"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t subscribe to the view that any invocation of Hitler in a debate is an automatic defeat (the so-called “Godwin’s Law<\/a>“) but it is definitely true that equating various people to Hitler appears to be a national pastime in election silly season. Case in point: the Republican Jewish Conference has declared Obama’s presidency would usher in a new Holocaust<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pennsylvania Democrats are calling on U.S. Sen. John McCain’s campaign to disavow the letter <\/a>from the state Republican Party’s “Victory 2008” committee.
The letter, which reportedly was sent to 75,000 Jews, was signed by
\nthree prominent Jewish Republicans, including Sandra Schultz Newman, a
\nformer state Supreme Court justice, and I. Michael Coslov, the campaign
\nchairman of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The e-mail, after extolling McCain’s record and questioning U.S.
\nSen. Barack Obama’s commitment to Israel — as well as his associations
\nwith William Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — says that “Jewish
\nAmericans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November
\n4th, 2008. Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s
\nand 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let’s not make a similar one this
\nyear<\/span>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both Coslov and Newman are distancing themselves from the letter,
\nsaying they hadn’t actually read its contents before signing on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Of course the signatories are now back-pedaling; after all, they hadn’t expected anyone to find out what they were doing, now, did they? The official reaction from the Republican Party in PA is typically unrepentant:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Michael Barley, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Republican Party, told
\nThe New York Times that the e-mail “definitely went a little bit
\nfarther than the facts would support” and that the political operative
\nwho composed it had been fired.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

“a little bit farther” ? How about a mile beyond? Disgusting that they can’t even bring themselves to – ahem – condemn<\/span>. <\/p>\n

I’d like to praise my fellow Beliefnet blogger Rabbi Hirschfield, who took exceptional umbrage to the invocation of the Holocaust<\/a>, pointing out correctly that doing so defames the memory of the Holocaust itself and trivializes it for mere political posturing:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

How can the same people who pride themselves on maintaining the
\nimportance of Holocaust memory invoke the real horrors of the past as a
\npolitical tool? Ironically, mobilizing that kind of fear and memory of
\npast defeat was used by early Nazis to mobilize Germans in support of
\nNational Socialism in its early stages.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

… do they not
\nsee that the comparison itself denigrates all that they value about the
\nstrength of this country and the accomplishments attained by Jews
\nprecisely because this is not Weimar Germany? America now is not
\nGermany then, and it shows a profound lack of appreciation for American
\nJewish experience to miss that point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

I’d only add that the repeated invocation of the Holocaust has already diluted it’s impact as a great moral warning. It’s almost the corollary of Godwin’s Law – by equating minor political disagreements with something so enormous as the Holocaust, it is the Holocaust that is trivialized, not the other way around. This tendency to analogize everything to Hitler and the Holocaust is what feeds the crazies’ Holocaust-denial and further anti-Semitism. <\/p>\n

I also note that John Kerry did not come under this kind of attack from right-wing Jewish groups. Could that be because Kerry was white, and had a non-foreign sounding name? I think it’s clear that the signatories of this email – their lame protestations aside – were banking on tapping into the fear of Obama’s Otherness and the latent muslim smear to amplify their message of fear. <\/p>\n

Also note that this is not an isolated incident. In Florida, for example, the following sign<\/a> was displayed at a McCain campaign field office in Pompano Beach:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Again, note the emphasis on Obama’s middle name – intended to highlight his Otherness, as well as link him to the worst dictators of the 20th Century. The GOP county chair condemned the sign and ordered it removed, but the sign’s creator was unrepentant<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In other ODS news, here’s a few more gems<\/a> courtesy of Kevin Drum.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t subscribe to the view that any invocation of Hitler in a debate is an automatic defeat (the so-called “Godwin’s Law“) but it is definitely true that equating various people to Hitler appears to be a national pastime in election silly season. 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City of Brass is his weblog, which was founded in 2002 under the name UNMEDIA. He is a co-founder of the annual Brass Crescent Awards. The name City of Brass refers to the Story of the City of Brass in the Thousand and One Nights, and the poem by Rudyard Kipling of the same name: Here was a people whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion; And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust. -- Thousand and One Nights, Story of the City of Brass IN A land that the sand overlays, the ways to her gates are untrod, A multitude ended their days whose fates were made splendid by God, Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall, And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all! -- Rudyard Kipling, The City of Brass (1909)"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}