Regarding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comparing the border situation to Nazi concentration camps, she may or may not have said this on purpose to push our buttons. She just got millions of dollars of free publicity and her followers love it.
Rep. Cheney of Wyoming begged Ocasio-Cortez to “spend just a few minutes learning” the history of the World War II genocide, tweeting that “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
Ocasio-Cortez shot back at Cheney minutes after her posting:
”Hey Rep. Cheney, since you’re so eager to ‘educate me,’ I’m curious: What do YOU call building mass camps of people being detained without a trial? How would you dress up DHS’s mass separation of thousands of children at the border from their parents?”
Cortez knows how to manipulate the press. She is neither stupid nor naive. This was the wrong issue to attack her on and she is using the uproar to her own advantage. There had been ghettos before. There had been internment camps and concentration camps. There were concentration camps starting in 1933. But Nazi Germany doesn’t turn to a systematic mass murder really until 1941.
Concentration camps were not a Nazi invention. Anna Lind-Guzik writes “in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, various imperial forces — including the British and Germans in their African colonies, the Spanish in the Caribbean, and Americans in the West — engaged in the practice of rounding up civilians into concentration camps as a tactic to suppress indigenous guerrilla warfare. By isolating the civilian population, fighters had fewer places to hide. Large populations of mostly women and children were held in terrible, quasi-permanent conditions, without trial, and died en masse from disease, malnutrition, and exposure.”
The term itself comes from reconcentración, a Spanish policy deployed against Cubans in the 1890s, which was then reused by the British during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.
Using the term “concentration camp” to describe the indefinite detention without trial of thousands of civilians in inhumane conditions — under armed guard and without adequate provisions or medical care — is indeed a false comparison. However as human beings the Holocaust should have taught the world an important lesson about speaking out for humanity when humans are ill-treated. In memory of the 6 million Jews who perished because they were considered less than human, AS A CHILD OF SURVIVORS OF AUSCHWITZ, I will not accept my government treating migrants, especially children, like animals. CALL IT ANY NAME YOU WANT, IT IS MORALLY WRONG. Lock up those who have criminal records or send them back to their country of origin.
The term “never again” should be a lesson which Judaism teaches to the world.
Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg
Edison, New Jersey
