The Simon Wiesenthal Center releases the following statement on Thursday:
was shocked by White House Press Secretary’s absurd and inappropriate statement alleging that Syrian President Assad is worse than Adolph Hitler. The comparison, which was made just before the annual commemoration of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day was beyond inappropriate. The Simon Wiesenthal Center endorsed President Trump’s decision to bomb a Syrian airbase after Assad’s forces deployed chemical weapons that targeted and killed Syrian civilians, including women and children. Our Center also has called on the international community to try Assad for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.
However, Assad’s crimes pale in comparison to the unprecedented scope of the genocide, murder, mayhem and global conflict unleashed by Hitler and his supporters in Germany and across Europe.
– 20 million Russians and other citizens of the former Soviet Union were killed by Hitler’s forces during WWII.
– The first victims of Hitler were his German opponents who were dispatched as early as 1933 to brutal concentration camps.
– German Jews were the earliest targets for brutal Nazi mistreatment starting with stripping them of their rights and culmination with many of them murdered in the gas chambers in Nazi Death Camps. Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Question unleashed a unique campaign to murder every Jew under Nazi control—wherever they lived and whatever their age. Six million (two out of every three) European Jews perished, many in the gas chambers at Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Auschwitz Birkenau.
Mr. Spicer’s goal was to rally support for President Trump’s tough stand on Syria. It may have had the opposite effect among Russians, Jews, Slavs and other victims of the Nazis. Vladimir Putin will certainly use this grotesque misstatement to further bolster his pro-Syrian position among his citizens.
For 40 years the Simon Wiesenthal Center has been teaching millions of people about the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust. One key lesson is that it is inappropriate to compare Auschwitz, or the Warsaw Ghetto to contemporary events. The goal of Holocaust education, indeed the goal to standing up to evil leaders like Assad is to avoid future catastrophes and avoid the unfathomable scale of Hitler’s genocidal crime.
That is the lesson that all our leaders should take away from Holocaust Memorial Day later this month.
(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
One Response
I don’t understand what the brouhaha is all about. Spicer wasn’t trying to minimize Hitler’s atrocities, he was basically saying that Assad is in the same category. He said Assad is worse but this shouldn’t be taken out of context. How do you measure who is a bigger rasha when you’re dealing with mass murderers? They’re all the same, from Stalin to Hitler to Ahmadinejad to Kim Jong-un to Assad. If we say Hitler is worse than Assad, it’s almost as if we’re being melamed zechus on Assad. Amalek, Eisav, it’s all the same.