“On a personal note, some of you know I’m Jewish. My father came to this country at the age of 17 from Poland. He came over, other people in his family did not come over. Those people died. Children died. … So that is in my heart, to see what a lunatic can do by stirring up racial hatred.”
This is just a new variation on the common and hysterical claim that “Muslims are the new Jews,” which has been answered many times — as often as it has been asserted. Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong, Leftist “journalist” Jeffrey Goldberg, Islamic Republic of Iran front group Board member Reza Aslan, Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison, Nicholas Kristof, Canadian Muslim leader Syed Sohawardy, and Hamas-linked CAIR leader Jacob Bender, among many others, have repeated it. The blazingly brilliant Daniel Greenfield takes it apart in this video.
And in 2014, Bill Maher noted: “Jews weren’t oppressing anybody. There weren’t 5,000 militant Jewish groups. They didn’t do a study of treatment of women around the world and find that Jews were at the bottom of it. There weren’t 10 Jewish countries in the world that were putting gay people to death just for being gay.” Indeed, and no one is calling for or justifying genocide of Muslims now; there is no individual or group remotely comparable to the National Socialists in any genuine sense.
The late Christopher Hitchens also refuted this idea when writing a few years ago about the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero: “‘Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,’ Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like.”
The purpose of statements like the one Sanders made is to intimidate people into thinking that criticism of Islamic supremacism leads to the concentration camps, and thus there must be no criticism of Islamic supremacism. The unstated assumption is that if one group was unjustly accused of plotting subversion and violence, and was viciously persecuted and massacred on the basis of those false accusations, then any group accused of plotting subversion and violence must be innocent, and any such accusation must be in service of preparing for their subversion and massacre. It is simply a method to foreclose on any criticism of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism.
“Sanders references the Holocaust when discussing Trump’s ‘intolerance’ toward Muslims,” by John Wagner, Washington Post, April 2, 2016 (thanks to Lookmann):
MILWAUKEE — In the midst of chastising Donald Trump on Saturday for showing intolerance toward Muslims, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders told an audience here that some of his relatives died in the Holocaust as the result of “a lunatic … stirring up racial hatred.”
“On a personal note, some of you know I’m Jewish,” Sanders said during a town hall meeting here. “My father came to this country at the age of 17 from Poland. He came over, other people in his family did not come over. Those people died. Children died. … So that is in my heart, to see what a lunatic can do by stirring up racial hatred.”
Sanders’s apparent reference to Adolf Hitler directly followed his recollection of Trump’s controversial comments late last year about temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country.
The senator from Vermont told his audience here that he and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a Muslim in Congress, visited a Washington mosque shortly afterward to denounce the Republican front-runner’s position and talk about “fighting Islamaphobia.”
Sanders said if he is elected president, “trust me, Muslims, or anybody in this country, are not going to live in fear because of their religion, because of the color of their skin, because of the country they came from. That is not what this country is about.”
Sanders then launched into his reflection on his family and the Holocaust.
During an appearance Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week,” Sanders tried to clarify his comments.
“I did not compare Trump to Hitler,” he told host George Stephanopoulos after he played video of Sanders’s remarks….