Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Excellent article! .. excerpts ..

...Auschwitz was not terrorism by an outsider; it was state militarism against supposed outsiders, i.e., Jews. Indeed, Higgins’s sentiments would resonate with Nazi propaganda itself: we must be strong, we must fight the enemy, we must protect ourselves.

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Indeed, the lesson of the Holocaust is the exact opposite of what Higgins has proposed. Muslims today are not Nazis – they are more like Jews, hounded by the Nazis, and now being refused entry to the United States if they come from six majority-Muslim countries. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that we must sow more fear and apply more collective punishment – it is that we must be wary of state militarism and must second-guess ourselves when we demonize other groups, especially unpopular ones.

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And what should happen to these “suspects”? “Kill them all.” Exactly what Hitler and his minions said about my grandparents. You can’t tell a good Jew from a bad Jew, so kill them all before they kill us. Remember, Jews, too, were suspected en masse of threatening Germany and its way of life. We didn’t use bombs – we used banks, they said, warmongering and controlling countries from within. They way the Nazis described us, we were every bit as dangerous as “radicalized Islamic suspects.”

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...his comments align themselves more closely with the Nazis than with those who were murdered by Nazis.

Most troubling of all is that Higgins isn’t some powerless white nationalist ranting on Reddit. He’s in the U.S. House of Representatives, a member of the majority party. He backs up his words with actions. Higgins has heartily supported efforts to deport as many undocumented people as possible, to ban as many Muslims from entry to the U.S. as possible, and to punish “sanctuary cities” which refuse to cooperate with such efforts.

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I suspect Congressman Higgins will apologize for violating Auschwitz rules by taping inside a room where hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. But it would be more important for him to reflect on the reasons why they were murdered, and how his own attitudes perpetuate them.

.. your link .. http://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-goes-to-auschwitz-gets-holocaust-totally-wrong

Higgins could take some time to contemplate the fact that rhetoric as his does not contribute positively to the safety of Americans which he rightly holds
so dear, in fact no doubt, as Jay Michaelson says, it encourages radicalization and feeds the fire for a religious war which too many are intent on creating.