OPINION

Cheapening The Holocaust Is A Political Atrocity

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An elderly Jewish woman held her cooing grandbaby inside a Ukraine death camp minutes before they were to be “liquidated.” The family had just been ordered to undress: shoes in one stack, top clothing in another, and underclothing in a third.  The baby’s parents, eyes welled up with tears, watched nearby.  

Dad bent down to comfort his young son who was old enough to know what was about to happen.  As the little boy struggled to fight his tears, Dad stroked his hair, spoke softly to him and pointed to the sky. At that moment, an SS trooper barked commands to his comrade who abruptly counted off 20 people and shoved them toward a dirt mound.  Beyond the mound was a massive pit filled with a thousand bodies wedged together, stacked on top of one another with their heads exposed.

An SS trooper holding a tommy gun sat with his feet dangling over the lip of the pit, smoking a cigarette.   

“The people went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them,” wrote a German eyewitness from his letter which was read in the courtroom at the Nuremberg trials.  “They lay down, then I heard a series of shots.  The next batch was approaching already.  They went down in the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot.”

And so it went, batch after batch, wrote William L. Shirer in his best-seller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  “All the 30-odd principal Nazi concentration camps were death camps,” wrote Shirer, “and millions of tortured, starved inmates perished in them.”

In a week when Israel inaugurated a future village called “Trump Heights,” named for a president whose daughter converted to Judaism, Israel-hater Ilhan Omar and her apologist AOC are trying to convince the world that Trump is a budding Hitler.  

"The United States is running concentration camps on our Southern Border,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a video where she called Trump a fascist.  “That is exactly what they are; they are concentration camps … The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing ...”

What’s extraordinarily disturbing is how easily an ignorant Instagram video from the toothy congresswoman can so quickly focus the nation’s attention on intellectual roadkill. Leave it to leftists to warn against dehumanizing people by dehumanizing people.

By calling ICE detention centers concentration camps, AOC puts herself on the level of a media-starved Miley Cyrus who shocked her audiences by spreading her legs and grabbing her crotch.  It’s low stuff.  Daring but profane, ignorant and degrading.  It’s become infuriating to see the 5-foot-4 rebel congresswoman spit out historical vulgarities, double down on them when she’s criticized, and showered with accolades from starstruck liberals who admire her knack for regurgitating on the status quo.

Liberals like CNN’s Angela Rye told Chris Cuomo last week that people on the right are threatened by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because she “tells the truth.” Rye said calling ICE detention centers concentration camps was accurate, but AOC also had a larger point.

“The bottom line here is that there is an inhumane crisis happening at the Southern border, and it is because of how these people look,” Rye said.  “It’s white fear – that is what is driving this.  It is racism at its core. It’s what the foundation of what this country is built upon.  Period.”

That’s it, Ms. Rye.  White fear.  You figured it out. Enforcing immigration law has nothing to do with the sea of humanity pouring over the border in open defiance of our laws, and now, creating an environment for pandemic diseases.  It has nothing to do with streams of foreigners – 140,000 in May – who fake “credible fear of persecution” and use Rent-A-Child programs to exploit our Swiss cheese asylum laws.  

While ICE and border agents get their noses bloodied on the front lines, politicians like AOC – who’s part of a body that can actually fix loopholes in the law – sit on the sidelines yelling at Trump. And while AOC and others pontificate on the “academic” definition of concentration camps, needlessly butchering history, Americans are growing sick of the problems created by a constant flow of illegals packing into their cities.   

On weekends in Los Angeles, hundreds of illegals line the streets to sell food and knick-knacks from blankets and stolen shopping carts; without permits, without paying taxes, with no regard for sanitation, in open defiance of our laws.  Police, handcuffed by a sanctuary city mayor, stand nearby and watch.  

Yet Trump, the one man who’s dead serious about getting us out of the border conundrum, is being portrayed as Adolf Hitler – a man who ruthlessly starved, butchered, shot and exterminated millions of people he considered to be sub-human.

“But think about the despicable people we’ve had in history,” said CNN Don Lemon, making the argument that CNN should stop giving the president a platform. “Think about Hitler.  … It starts with little lies.  It starts with little lies that become bigger lies.  And it starts with people who become brainwashed.”

This is why it’s futile to debate disingenuous liberals. If you support Trump’s push to control the border, you’re brainwashed.  But if you want to abolish ICE, or you believe that ICE detention centers are concentration camps, or that Trump is racist, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, well, you just have a different point of view.  

 In Lemon’s logic, Polish Parliament member Dominik Tarczynski must be brainwashed, too.  He was so agitated by AOC’s concentration camp comparison that he tweeted a letter inviting her to Poland to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinda, Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek “where over three million human souls were extinguished and millions more were detained and affected directly.”  

The Nazi death camps, he wrote, are “a deep wound” that Poles must deal with every day.  

“This is why when someone cheapens the history, or uses it for political point-scoring, we become agitated and upset,” he wrote, saying he’s a fan and friend of America.  “I understand that there are heightened tensions in your politics right now, but I would urge severe caution in attempting to leverage phrases such as ‘concentration camp’ for political ends.  It will lead nowhere good.”

From The Depths president Edward Mosberg, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, agreed.  He also invited Ocasio-Cortez to visit concentration camps and other historical sites to better educate herself on what happened there.  

She declined.  What a shock.