Dershowitz Slams Media Comparisons of Trump to Nazis, Labels Them 'Holocaust Deniers'
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz called those who compare President Donald Trump or the American political system to Adolf Hilter’s Germany “Holocaust deniers.”
Appearing on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday, Dershowitz was asked to respond to those in the media who compare Trump to Hitler, such as a Washington Post columnist who accused the president of deploying “the fascist playbook for the midterms,” or HBO’s Bill Maher and Sunny Hostin of “The View,” both of whom have also likened the president to Hitler.
On Monday, MSNBC panelist Elie Mystal said, “Look at Trump’s tweets. I think people would be more outraged by them if we reported them in the original German.”
Mystal later hammered the president for making “on the fly concentration camps” to house the large numbers of migrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border, the Media Research Center reported.
Dershowitz, who had ancestors murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, said, “Anybody who compares Trump, or anybody else, to Hitler is essentially a Holocaust denier. Because what they are saying is there were no gas chambers, no Auschwitz, no plan to kill 6 million Jews. By comparing it, they minimize it.”
The legal scholar pointed out the goal of the genocide was to kill anybody with Jewish blood, and the Nazis succeeded in killing millions.
“To say that anything that happened since then is comparable to the Holocaust, and certainly to compare the American political system to anything that happened in the Holocaust, is just outrageous,” Dershowitz said.
“These analogies that people draw is the cruelest form of minimization of the Holocaust,” he said.
Dershowitz further contended it is evidence of a lack of a knowledge of history that people would make such comparisons.
“It’s remarkable how little history people know and how little they’re prepared to learn about something as tragic as that,” he said. “The result is the false analogies all over the place. Everybody is compared to Hitler. Everything is compared to the Holocaust.”
A Holocaust awareness study released last spring found that two-in-three Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 could not say what Auschwitz was.
Overall, 41 percent of Americans could not identify the Poland-based concentration and extermination camp, where the Nazis killed more than 1 million Jewish people.
On the positive side, 96 percent of respondents said they believe the Holocaust happened, though 31 percent of Americans and 41 percent of millennials think that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed, versus the more widely acknowledged figure of 6 million.
After touring a concentration camp, then-Supreme Allied commander (and future president) Gen. Dwight Eisenhower feared, even in his time, that there would be a tendency for people to write off the full extent of the Holocaust as propaganda.
Following a visit to Ohrdruf in Germany, where he viewed thousands of dead, emaciated bodies, Eisenhower wrote Chief of Staff General George Marshall, “The things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.
Gen. Eisenhower visits the Ohrdruf Concentration Camp in 1945. (Eisenhower Library)
Photo: Me pic.twitter.com/VJ61ZOtwuR
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“In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.'”
Testimony by Dwight D Eisenhower lest people ever try to claim that concentration camps, and the Holocaust were mere propoganda. pic.twitter.com/riXvtbctz2
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Eisenhower and Gen. George Patton ordered U.S. troops in the area to tour the camps, so there would be thousands of witnesses to what the Nazis had done to the Jewish people.
The Supreme Allied commander also issued a call to prominent members of the press — including Joseph Pulitzer and Edward R. Murrow — to document and report on what happened in the camps.
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