
Donald Trump and Debora Lipstadt
A recent news article, which quotes Debora Lipstadt, hints that The Donald might be a Holocaust denier. Or maybe he is just ignorant about the Holocaust, in spite of the fact that his son-in-law Jared Kushner is Jewish.
The following quote is from the news article, cited above:
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President Donald Trump has barely been in office for a week and already he’s being accused, by prominent and credible people, of aiding and abetting Holocaust denial. Both Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and conservative commentator John Podhoretz have gone public with such criticisms.
This outcry resulted from the White House statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which omitted any mention that the Holocaust was an effort to get rid of the Jewish population of Europe. All previous presidents had made mention of the fact that while many non-Jewish people were killed in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, the machinery of the Holocaust was created and effectively used to kill more than 60 percent of Europe’s Jewish population.
This omission is especially troubling in light of the fact that Holocaust denialism — which is about either outright denying or aggressively downplaying the Jewish genocide at the hands of the Nazis — is a common feature of the specific variety of white nationalism that’s being mainstreamed by Trump and his “alt-right” advisers, including Steve Bannon, who formerly ran Breitbart. The fact that Trump’s Holocaust statement was issued at almost the same time as his ban on refugees and immigrants from certain countries — which reminded many observers of the efforts to turn away Jewish refugees during World War II — did not help matters.
In addition, Trump is known to be fond of conspiracy theories, including overtly racist ones like the “birtherism” claim he lobbed at former president Barack Obama. Holocaust denial is the granddaddy of conspiracy theories, and many of the common tropes and strategies used by a wide range of conspiracy mongers can be traced to efforts to deny or explain away the Nazi campaign to murder Jews.
“The fact of the matter is that the Holocaust, as defined by historians, is not ‘all the bad things the Nazis did,’” explained historian Deborah Lipstadt over the phone. “The Nazis did lots and lots of bad things. But the Holocaust is the attempt to annihilate European Jewry.”
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America does not have a law against Holocaust denial — yet, but Trump is setting a very bad example. It is time for him to get with the program, and honor the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.
America should have a special day to acknowledge that Jews, who tried to escape the Nazis in Germany, were turned away when they tried to escape on the ship named the Saint Louis. The ship was forced to return to Germany where the passengers were killed by the Nazis in gas chambers. Oh, the humanity!