Here’s a little rant, brought to you by people who ought to know better…
Why can’t they bring themselves to say it out loud? Because perhaps that would make them complicit. Makes me want to take every single person who froths at the mouth at the mere mention of concentration camps and SHAKE them.
Wake up and LOOK at what’s happening throughout our country, but particularly and most noticeably at our southern border and quit denying the truth.
Also: Please do not presume to speak for all Jews when you say that these are not concentration camps. When Jews tell you that we see concentration camps, believe us.
Oh, I’m sorry. What’s that? You lost family in the Holocaust? That makes you an expert?
Well, guess what?
So. Did. I.
The Austrian branch, in particular, is still here, sort of. Some of the family never made it out.
My Russian, Austrian, and Polish heritage entitles me to say that these ARE concentration camps within our borders. And I’m not the only one saying it, either.
What they are not–YET–are extermination camps, but then the Shoah did not start with those camps, it ended with them.
And another thing: If you’re anything other than an indigenous Native American, your argument that these people deserve the treatment they’re receiving now denies the circumstances under which your family, under which ANY Jew who is here in the states, came to be here in the first place. And that’s not even addressing the atrocious conditions under which a lot of our Native populations suffer. If you think Flint’s water is bad…but I digress.
I’ll tell you what’s insulting: Assuming that the term “never again” only applies to the Jewish people. That’s what’s insulting. Jewish law tells us to do the right thing. How is denying that these people are being treated like animals doing the right thing??!
THIS is what it looks like to do the right thing:
LA Times: Op-Ed: I’m Jewish and I don’t say this lightly: ‘Never again’ is right now in America
The Canary: Jewish activists say ‘never again is now’ as they shut down US ‘concentration camp’
These children and adults in cages, penned up like so much cattle…THEY are PEOPLE and they deserve to be treated like people. When you dehumanize a person, you can excuse away anything.
Oh, and by the way? That law people love to quote regarding immigration was put in place by neo-Confederate racists who felt threatened when our families came here to escape the pogroms and murder in Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine, Poland, and the like. We could NOT have emigrated to this country in the same way after 1924.
So because we’re here now, do we get to tell these people “NO, go back where you came from!” so they can face murder there? That makes us the very worst sort of hypocrites.
That’s the very opposite of justice and human compassion. It is the antithesis of what it means to BE JEWISH.
Here. THIS is what I’m talking about: Solidarity. When you read it, remember: It’s a year and some change since I wrote it.
Look how much distance we’ve traveled in a little over 13 months.