One of the benefits of our hard-won FREEDOM is not having to suffer abuse in silence

This has been bothering me ... a lot.

And so I've decided to write a letter.

Dear Arianna Huffington:

Whether you wrote this headline yourself, or you simply permitted someone else to do so, the responsibility for it lies with you. Perhaps you thought that abusing your political opponents by equating them with Hitler and his Nazis was a clever idea. Or maybe you get some kind of twisted “kick” out of exploiting the slogan of post-Holocaust Jews for your own partisan purposes. I gather you assumed no one would care, or that even if someone did - every knock’s a boost, right? - you would just become that much more famous, entertaining your minions at the expense of truth and history.

You like to be outrageous, don’t you? And you make millions from it. Money is power, and it’s obvious that these are what make you tick, without regard for the bounds of moral conduct.

If I were to give you more credit than you deserve, I could try to convince myself that you aren’t aware of the gravity of the expression, “Never Again.” But you are not a stupid woman; you know damn well that it refers to the attempted – and nearly successful – extermination of a people, my people.

Unless you live under a rock - or are one of the 45% of Britons who never heard of Auschwitz - you know damn well that the Nazis performed inhuman experiments upon us, purposefully starved and brutalized us, degraded us, and murdered us and our babies … by the tens of thousands per day … for years on end. And if you can do the simplest math, you realize that six million dead Jews is like 9/11 every day for two thousand days. That’s five and a half years. Just think, Arianna -if you can extend your imagination beyond one political cycle- of suffering 9/11 each and every day ... from now until early in the year 2014.

Imagine losing your family to such evil. Imagine afterwards having no grandparents, no aunts and uncles, no cousins, no brothers or sisters, no mom and dad, no family photos or treasured heirlooms. You would have only nightmares to keep you company, and you would be haunted all your days with the knowledge that the Nazis stuck a bayonet through your baby sister or made decorations with your DNA. If by some miracle you were still at all sane by the end of it, you too would say “Never Again,” wouldn’t you? And you would really mean it. And you might even be driven to base the rest of your life, your every breath, on seeing that it never happened again, to anyone, anywhere, ever.

Suppose then, that some sixty years later, in the twilight of your life when your health is failing and you know you will never be strong again, along comes some vacuous (or vicious) political charlatan who finds it amusing that you say “Never Again.” And in one stroke on the worldwide web, she takes everything you have witnessed and everything you have felt, and all those years and all that death and destruction, and she cheapens it, obliterates its meaning, and leaves you with less than dust for all your troubles.

Ms. Huffington, I see you and I accuse you, I reject you and condemn you, for daring to take the words of Jews, the rallying cry of our remnant, and using those very words to diminish the public perception of the Holocaust, its scope and significance, all that it was and is for us, and all that it was and should be for you.

In an astonishing display of callous arrogance, you have violated the sanctity of their deaths and demeaned the lives of those who survived. In your self-serving effort to demonize the American government, you have purveyed a crass misrepresentation that negates all perspective and proportion. By trying to equate –or replace– Hitler with Bush as the pinnacle of evil, you have rendered the entire moral spectrum meaningless. If Bush is a Hitler, you see, then there was no Hitler.

But there was.

And because there was, I object. I object to what you have done. And in all seriousness, Arianna Huffington, I curse you - quite appropriately I believe -
that there should be no memory of your existence.

Yael bat Avraham
in Exile
on the 7th day of Tamuz, 5768

Comments

[oh]

thank you