Letter to the Editor: Don’t Trivialize.Comments (0)

Don’t Trivialize

I am sick and tired of coming home every Friday afternoon, after a hard week of work, and picking up the JEWISH TIMES from my mail box, only to find another letter whose writer makes Hitler comparisons. Several weeks ago you published an extremely offensive letter comparing President Obama to Hitler and the president’s health care proposals to Nazi Germany. Last week’s issue had another letter, this one declaring that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez “is a new Hitler” who “makes Josef Goebbels look like a Sunday preacher” (“Chavez And Hitler”).

I hold the utmost disdain for Mr. Chavez, who, despite winning repeated elections since he was first elected in 1999, has ruled as a virtual dictator. His statements against Israel are indefensible, and he has had his news media run defamatory anti-Semitic articles attacking Venezuela’s small Jewish community. But he has ruled for eleven years, without concentration camps and gas chambers, without mass arrests, and without launching military attacks on other countries.

Are we going to call every tin-horn dictator in the world another Hitler? Another Goebbels? To do so trivializes the Holocaust; to do so belittles the great tragedy that overcame Europe between 1933 and 1945. To compare Hitler to a decent man such as Barack Obama, or even to an obnoxious despot such as Hugo Chavez, insults the memory of 6 million Jewish victims of this monstrous evil, not to mention the memory of additional millions of non-Jewish victims. These casual shouts of “Nazi” belittle history. One may compare a Pol Pot, who murdered over 2 million of his fellow Cambodians (one-fifth of the Cambodians) to Hitler. But when a dictator, however evil, has ruled for 11 years with no sign of initiating genocide or military aggression, or when a president of the United States, who has Jewish advisers and who has visited synagogues and who has held a sedar in the White House, initiates policies with which you disagree, please leave your shouts of “Nazi” at home.

Alan C. Cohen
Baltimore