Political rhetoric and the holocaust – Sept. 5 2015

As the election cycle takes up more traction, I am noticing a trend of using Holocaust references in campaigning.    How do we campaign with dignity and class.  In other words, is it ever right to invoke the holocaust in politics. 

There was a recent backlash against York Centre Conservative MP Mark Adler for noting in campaign literature and on his website that he’s the son of a Holocaust survivor. He posted it on a large sidewalk billboard in his neighborhood, Bathurst street and Sheppard, declaring his qualifications as an MP. 

I didn’t think he needs to use the Holocaust as a way to get votes, but I am sure that works on the Bathurst corridor.  Apparently others felt he had crossed the line and tweeted how inappropriate it was to link his campaign to the holocaust.  A social media war was launched, each proving their side.  His side said he wasn’t using the Holocaust for votes, just putting out his biography.  In fact they said he is the only MP who is a holocaust survivor.  The opposing side said he was using it for personal gain and besides he is not the first holocaust survivor to be an MP.  That honour resides with Raymonde Folco, a Liberal who served as a Montreal-area MP from 1997 to 2011, preceded Adler in that distinction, and that Folco was herself a child survivor of the Holocaust, not just the son of a survivor. A recent CJN article by Paul Lungen commented that it wasn’t the first incident of late in which a Canadian politician invoked the Holocaust and was swiftly condemned for it. Is it ever appropriate to reference the Shoah in political and campaign rhetoric. 

Raymonde Folco, was asked and criticized Adler for, as she put it, “us[ing] the Holocaust in this way, for personal ends.”

In March, federal Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney testified before a parlimentary committee in support of his government’s anti-terror bill, C-51.

Defending a part of the bill that would ban the spread of terrorist propaganda online, he said, “The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers. It began with words.”

NDP public safety critic Randall Garrison said the comment trivialized the Holocaust and accused Blaney of using “inflated rhetoric.”

The night before, in a speech to alumni at McGill University, federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau had attacked the Conservative government’s immigration policies, saying it had stirred up anti-Muslim sentiment.

After adding that “we should all shudder to hear the same rhetoric that led to a ‘none is too many’ immigration policy towards Jews in the ’30s and ’40s being used to raise fears against Muslims today,” Trudeau faced criticism that the reference was offensive and the historical parallel inaccurate.

And then last weekend in a twitter war, our own Mayor Burton wrote that Harper was wasting tax payer money by hiring Canadian veterans as his personal bodyguards.  He added that there were others who needed extra bodyguards, citing Hitler and Mussolini.  The backlash was quick, asking why Burton was comparing Veterans to Nazi’s, which he didn’t actually do, but our Mayor had to quickly apologize. 

The question of whether citing the Holocaust is ever acceptable in politics divides even those who are close to the issue.

Nelson Wiseman, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the child of Holocaust survivors himself, said he doesn’t consider either Adler’s or Blaney’s Holocaust references to be in poor taste. 

“Is it in poor taste for an Aboriginal to say, ‘I’m a survivor of the residential school system’? Is it in poor taste to say ‘My relative starved to death in Cambodia’” he asked.

“To me, Adler made a pitch for the Jewish vote… That’s perfectly OK. Chinese politicians will pitch for the Chinese vote. Sikhs will pitch for the Sikh vote. A lot of people identify with those running for political office with the same heritage as them… Every politician, by definition, has a political agenda… They say something they think will resonate with people.” 

Wiseman added that Blaney’s claim about the Holocaust beginning with words was hardly irrelevant. 

“Should we discount Mein Kampf?” he asked. “Many people did.”

Myer Siemiatycki, a professor of politics at Ryerson University whose parents also survived the Shoah, argued that political parties and candidates can best honour the Holocaust by combating racism and protecting human rights, not by exploiting it for “personal electoral advantage,” as he believes Adler did.

“This debases the catastrophic Holocaust experience of the Jewish People into crass partisan marketing,” he added. 

Jonathan Kay, editor-in-chief of The Walrus magazine, drew national attention to Adler’s Holocaust reference by tweeting a picture of it on Adler’s campaign office poster Aug. 16.

Kay told The CJN it was the way Adler presented his heritage that he objects to. “It’s completely legitimate to say, ‘This tragedy is part of my family history and it’s given me a special appreciation for the universal lessons that came from it,’” Kay said. “But the context people see here is that the Conservative party has made a very special, and sometimes slightly obsessive, push to convince voters Harper is committed to the survival of the Jewish State… So it’s reasonable to interpret [Adler] as saying, “I’m more sensitive to the needs of Israel and world Jewry because of this one thing’… To my mind, he was exploiting his family history to reinforce Conservative talking points about foreign policy.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said it’s a given that politicians will mention their family heritage or involvement in a tragic historical event.

He pointed to U.S. Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, who “in pretty much every national debate and public arena wants to make sure it’s known he’s the son of Cuban refugees who fled Castro,” and retired U.S. senator Joe Lieberman, who “made a big deal of the fact he’s shomer Shabbat.”Rabbi Cooper stressed, “For many political candidates nowadays, every moment of their background is anyways vetted, debated, put on social media… Why should one never mention their family or history? I believe people who don’t do this are in the minority.” 

Eli Rubenstein, national director of March of the Living Canada, said because the Holocaust is widely known as an epic human tragedy, with extremely graphic imagery attached to it, people often invoke it to make a point. 

Sometimes that’s appropriate, sometimes it isn’t, he said

For instance, in 1979, Canada’s then-minister of employment and immigration Ron Atkey invoked the Holocaust appropriately, Rubenstein said. In making the case to grant tens of thousands of Vietnamese “boat people” asylum in Canada, Atkey referred to Canada’s infamous “none is too many” policy of barring Jews from immigrating to Canada during World War II.

Today I would say the biggest refugee crisis is in Syria and seeing the image of a young boy washed up dead on the shores of Turkey is horrifying.  And we can invoke the lessons of the 1930’s when Jews were prevented from emigrating because each country closed their doors.  We should push our government to open our doors to Syrian Refugees because it is a humanitarian crisis and we knew what it was like to have no where to go.

But citing the Holocaust in a way that trivializes it, or when it has no bearing on the subject at hand, is not OK, Rubenstein said. “For example, bullying is wrong, but one shouldn’t invoke the Holocaust to make that point.”

I would say, why bring up the holocaust, I can’t really think of a proper political moment to use it.  Instead focus on the issues at hand because you are simply playing with fire.  Lets talk about Israel, about the refugee crisis in Syria and the struggling world economy.  Lets talk about aboriginal issues  and poverty and infrastructure.  Lets talk about the issues that matter today and lets elect a party that will make change and make all our lives better.