Jewish Groups Denounce Huckabee

Jewish groups have denounced Mike Huckabee after he made the above comment in an interview with Breitbart. MSNBC reports:

“Whatever one’s views of the nuclear agreement with Iran – and we have been critical of it, noting that there are serious unanswered questions that need to be addressed – comments such as those by Mike Huckabee suggesting the president is leading Israel to another Holocaust are completely out of line and unacceptable,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, in a statement.“To hear Mr. Huckabee invoke the Holocaust when America is Israel’s greatest ally and when Israel is a strong nation capable of defending itself is disheartening,” Greenblatt added. The National Jewish Democratic Council called on others in the Party to denounce Huckabee’s remarks, saying they “may be the most inexcusable we’ve encountered in recent memory.” “To state that President Obama is leading Israelis ‘to the door of the oven’ is not only disgustingly offensive to the President and the White House, but shows utter, callous disregard for the millions of lives lost in the Shoah and to the pain still felt by their descendants today,” the organization stated.

Huckabee has doubled-down on his comments in several follow-up tweets.

NEW YORK CITY: Museum To Host Exhibit On Homosexuals Killed During Holocaust

Via press release:

Thousands of homosexuals, primarily gay men, perished at the hands of the Nazis along with millions of Jews and other victims including Roma (Gypsies), Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the disabled during World War II and the Holocaust.

The story of what happened to homosexuals in Nazi Germany is the subject of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s traveling exhibition Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945. The exhibition opens at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust on May 29, 2015 and will be on display through October 2015.

“The exhibition explores why homosexual behavior was identified as a danger to Nazi society and how the Nazi regime attempted to eliminate it,” says exhibition curator Edward Phillips. “The Nazis believed it was possible to ‘cure’ homosexual behavior through labor and ‘re-education.’ Their efforts to eradicate homosexuality left gay men subject to imprisonment, castration, institutionalization, and deportation to concentration camps.”

In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler assumed power, an estimated one million homosexual men lived in Germany. Nazi policy asserted that homosexual men carried a “degeneracy” that threatened the “disciplined masculinity” of Germany. The Nazis charged that homosexuals’ failure to father children was a factor in Germany’s declining birth rate, thus robbing the nation of future sons and daughters who could fight for and work toward a greater Reich.

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested for violating Nazi Germany’s law against homosexuality, and, of these, approximately 50,000 were sentenced to prison. An estimated 5,000 to 15,000 men were sent to concentration camps on similar charges, where an unknown number of them perished.

Guided tours of the exhibit will be conducted every Sunday in June at 12PM. The Museum Of Jewish Heritage is located at the southern tip of Manhattan at 36 Battery Place.

[Photo credit: German police file photo of a man arrested in October 1937 for suspicion of violating Paragraph 175. —US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Landesarchiv, Berlin.]

Mat Staver: Not Fighting Gay Marriage Is Like Not Fighting The Holocaust

"I think from the political right, the Republicans and so forth, those that are Republican elected officials state and federal, those who remain silent will ultimately be held accountable just as much as Democrats who advocate to the contrary. This is not an issue in which you can remain silent any more than you can remain silent during Nazi Germany. That was a moral issue, it was not defined by geography, there was a moral imperative there of the dignity of the human being, you can’t remain silent there and expect no consequences. Nor can you remain silent or advocate to the contrary with regards to the undermining of marriage as a union of a man and a woman." -Liberty Counsel president Mat Staver, speaking on Christian radio.

Anti-Defamation League Denounces FRC's Tony Perkins For "Boxcars" Comment

The Anti-Defamation League has denounced hate group leader Tony Perkins and demanded an apology for comparing the wedding cake ruling in Colorado to Jews being loaded onto boxcars. ADL director Abraham Foxman has issued a statement:

Tony Perkins’ invocation of the Holocaust in his statement referring to a judge’s finding that a baker unlawfully discriminated against gay customers is offensive and inappropriate. There is no comparison between contemporary American political issues and the actions of Hitler’s regime during the Holocaust. Such inappropriate analogies only serve to trivialize the Holocaust and are deeply offensive to Jews and other survivors, as well as those Americans who fought valiantly against the Nazis in World War II. We urge Perkins to apologize and to refrain from using Holocaust imagery to make his point.

Media Matters comments:

Extreme anti-LGBT rhetoric has defined Perkins' career, and the FRC's defamatory attacks on the LGBT community led the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to designate it an anti-gay hate group in 2010. Despite that record, Perkins and FRC are frequent fixtures on CNN and Fox News. Fox's Megyn Kelly in particular has given Perkins the star treatment, inviting him onto The Kelly File to attack basic non-discrimination policies and to champion anti-LGBT business discrimination. Given his reputation, Perkins isn't likely to take the ADL's advice to heart. But media outlets might want to reconsider whether it's wise to provide him a forum to continue peddling his apoplectic attacks on LGBT equality.

Here is the Perkins clip again.

Concentration Camp Christ

To mark Easter, Jews For Jesus have created a short film which depicts a cross-dragging Jesus being sent to the gas chambers by Nazi guards at a concentration camp. They write:

Jesus has often been wrongly associated with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. In reality, he is to be identified with those who were the victims. As a Jew, if he were in Europe at the time, Jesus may well have suffered the same fate of the six million who perished in the concentration camps. Jewish teaching promotes the idea that the death of Jews in the Holocaust accomplished kiddush ha Shem, the sanctification of God’s name. How much more then, the Bible tells us, Jesus’ death was intended by God for kiddush ha am, the sanctification of the people. Through him we can be made right with God.

Source.

ISRAEL: Monument To Gay Victims Of Holocaust Unveiled In Tel Aviv

Moscow Bans Tribute To Gay Holocaust Victims: It Would Promote Homosexuality

The Moscow government has banned a tribute to the gay victims of the Holocaust became it would give children the wrong idea about homosexuality. Via Gay Star News:

Around 20 participants applied to hold a peaceful event in Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow on 5 November. The intention of the tribute was to also spread the message about not repeating past mistakes and ensuring something like the Holocaust never happens again. But the authorities rejected the application, saying paying tribute to gay victims of Nazi Germany could potentially "influence" children on homosexuality. Nikolai Alekseev, founder of Moscow Pride, said: "The Moscow authorities are becoming increasingly absurd, and the banning of the rally to denounce the crimes of Hitler and Nazism is more proof of this. The government is approving of Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies."

Scott Lively is likely thrilled.

ISRAEL: Tel Aviv To Get Holocaust Monument To Gays Persecuted By Nazis

Monuments that honor the gay people persecuted by the Nazis exist in Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Sydney and San Francisco. Soon Tel Aviv will have one too.

At the center of the monument will be a concrete triangle containing a pink triangle, the symbol used by the Nazis used to mark homosexuals. A bench and plaque beside the monument will give information about the persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust.

The monument, costing NIS 150,000, was the idea of attorney Eran Lev, a member of the municipal council from the Meretz party. He began working on the project after receiving support from Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai. Landscape architect Professor Yael Moriah, who was responsible for the park’s renovation over the past years, was put in charge of the planning.

“This will be the first and only memorial site in Israel to mention the victims of the Nazis who were persecuted for anything other than being Jewish,” Lev told Haaretz. “As a cosmopolitan city and an international gay center, Tel Aviv will offer a memorial site that is universal in its essence. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not a monument, but a place — a place of quiet that will invite visitors to sit, contemplate, reflect and be in solitude.”

The monument will be located in a park near Tel Aviv's gay community center.

Concerned Women Head Penny Nance: Atheism Brought The Holocaust

Concerned Women head Penny Nance is super concernstipated because Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx endorsed the National Day Of Reason, an atheist response to this week's National Day Of Prayer. Earlier this week President Obama nominated Foxx to be Secretary of Transportation. Via Crooks And Liars:

When normal people think of the Enlightenment, they think of Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Goethe, Paine, Jefferson -- and the ideas that helped launch the American Revolution. When crazy right-wing Christians think of the Enlightenment, they apparently think of...Nazis. See what happens when you advance science, cast off the monarchy and separate church from state? Hitler. Sure, it sounds crazy -- but Nance's rant is of a piece to what Rick Santorum said during the presidential campaign.

(Tipped by JMG reader Ted)

NEW YORK: Jewish Anti-Defamation League Condemns Peter LaBarbera

Last week Peter LaBarbera hosted anti-gay crackpot Judith Reisman on his radio show, where the two of them agreed that gay activists are demonizing Christians "just like the Nazis used to do to the Jews." The Jewish Anti-Defamation League has responded with a press release denouncing the comparison.

No matter how strong one's objections to any cultural, religious, or ethnic group or how committed an organization is to its mission, invoking the Holocaust and the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people is offensive and has no place in civil discourse. While Holocaust analogies generate headlines and get attention, they do little in the service of truth, history or memory. When LaBarbera and Reisman suggest that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people are "demonizing [Christians] like the Nazis used to do to the Jews," they undermine the historical truth of the Holocaust as a singular event in human history that led to the murder of six million Jews and millions of others. Holocaust comparisons are deeply offensive and trivialize and distort the history and meaning of the Holocaust. We hope LaBarbera and Reisman will reconsider their words and refrain from invoking such analogies in the future.

RELATED: Later this month Reisman will keynote LaBarbera's annual fundraising dinner in the Chicago suburb of Arlington, Illinois.  Shortly before last year's event, where the keynote speaker was Scott Lively, LaBarbera claimed that gay activists threw a brick through the window of the Christian school that was to host the dinner.  Many continue to believe that the "attack" was staged to draw attention to the event.

Last Gay Jewish Holocaust Survivor Dies

Via Jerusalem Post:

Gad Beck, an anti-Nazi Zionist resistance fighter and the last known gay Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, died on Sunday in Berlin. He passed away in a senior citizens' home six days before his 89th birthday, which would have been on June 30. Beck was a pioneering gay activist and educator in a severely anti-homosexual, repressive post-World War II German society. He was famous for his witty, lively style of speaking. On a German talk show, he said, “The Americans in New York called me a great hero. I said no... I’m really a little hero.” Perhaps the single most important experience that shaped his life was the wartime effort to rescue his boyfriend. Beck donned a Hitler Youth uniform and entered a deportation center to free his Jewish lover Manfred Lewin, who had declined to separate himself from his family.

NEVER AGAIN: President Obama Mentions Gay Victims Of The Holocaust

In a speech yesterday at Washington's Holocaust Memorial, President Obama mentioned the homosexual victims of the Holocaust alongside a list of other groups targeted by the Nazi Party.

“We must tell our children about a crime unique in human history… The one and only Holocaust — six million innocent people — men, women, children, babies — sent to their deaths just for being different, just for being Jewish. We tell them, our children, about the millions of Poles and Catholics and Roma and gay people and so many others who also must never be forgotten. We must tell our children… But more than that, we must teach them. Because remembrance without resolve is a hollow gesture. Awareness without action changes nothing. In this sense, ‘never again’ is a challenge to us all — to pause and to look within.”

The number of gays who perished in the Holocaust is unknown, although as many as 100,000 homosexual men were arrested by the Nazis.

Last Known Gay Surivor Of The Nazis' Concentration Camps Dies At Age 98

Rudolf Brazda, believed to be the last known gay survivor of the Holocaust, has died at the age of 98.

Brazda was sent to the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp in August 1942 and held there until its liberation by U.S. forces in 1945. Nazi Germany declared homosexuality an aberration that threatened the German race, and convicted some 50,000 homosexuals as criminals. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 gay men were deported to concentration camps, where few survived. When a memorial to the Nazis’ gay victims was unveiled in Berlin in 2008, the LSVD said the last ex-prisoner that it knew of had died three years earlier. But the group said it was then contacted by Brazda, who visited the memorial at its invitation and became an honorary member. Brazda was born in 1913. He grew up in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz and repeatedly ran into trouble with Nazi authorities over his homosexuality before being sent to Buchenwald.

Earlier this year Brazda was named a knight in France's Legion of Honor.

Controversy At Gay Holocaust Memorial

Berlin's memorial to gay victims of the Holocaust is an austere concrete block with a small window that displays a "never-ending" video loop of two men kissing. Installed in 2008, original plans for the display called for the gender to the two people in the video to change every two years. But now that it's almost time for the switch to a lesbian video, historians are crying foul.

Alexander Zinn, a board member of the foundation that maintains the former Nazi concentration camps near Berlin, said such a move would distort history as there were no known Holocaust victims targeted for being lesbian. "Historical truth must remain the focus," Zinn told AFP on Thursday. He has banded together with other Holocaust experts and fired off a letter of protest to Culture Minister Michael Neumann and Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit. Neumann defended the plans as true to the original concept of the memorial in addressing present-day discrimination against lesbians and gays as well as the plight of homosexuals at the hands of the Nazis. "The option of using a lesbian film motif in the memorial is in no way meant to put on the same level the persecution of homosexual men and women under the Nazi regime," he said in a statement.

Jews Outraged: Palpatine Wants Holocaust Pope Pius XII To Be Named A Saint

Jewish groups are furious over Pope Palpatine's announcement that he is submitting Pope Pius XII, infamously known as "Hitler's Pope," for beatification.

Jewish leaders from around the world expressed their outrage today after the Pope opened the way for his controversial wartime predecessor to be made a saint, with some calling the possible beatification of Pius XII as "inopportune and premature". Benedict signed a decree last Saturday on the virtues of Pius, who has been criticised for not doing enough to stop the Holocaust. The decree means he can be beatified once a miracle attributed to him has been recognised. Beatification is the first major step towards sainthood. But Benedict, who has long admired Pius, continues to draw fire for ignoring concerns over the controversial pontiff. Among those to criticise him was the World Jewish Congress, whose president, Ronald Lauder, said: "As long as the archives about the crucial period 1939 to 1945 remain closed, and until a consensus on his actions ‑ or inaction ‑ concerning the persecution of millions of Jews in the Holocaust is established, a beatification is inopportune and premature."

The Vatican has long claimed that Pius 12 worked "behind the scenes" to lessen the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. The degree to which that may have happened has been disputed by Jewish and other historians. The Jewish Virtual Library contains numerous accounts of refused pleas for Pius 12 to intercede or at least condemn the actions of the Nazis. The site does note several instances where Pius 12 helped Jews obtain foreign passports, but maintains that he did so only under pressure from the Allies and very late in the war after it was clear that the Axis powers would lose. The Vatican has consistently declined to open its Holocaust-era archives.

SF's Pink Triangle Burned

Every Pride week in San Francisco, a massive fabric pink triangle is placed on the hills above the Castro, a visible-for-miles reminder of the murder of homosexuals in the Holocaust. Yesterday vandals succeeded in burning a portion of the installation.

Arson investigators were trying to determine what caused a fire that damaged the Pink Triangle on San Francisco's Twin Peaks Sunday morning just hours before the city's annual Pride Parade was set to kick off, a fire department lieutenant said. "Right now investigators are looking at all possible sources of ignition," San Francisco Fire Department Lt. Mindy Talmadge said. The blaze was reported at about 5 a.m. near Christmas Tree Point Road and was extinguished about 30 minutes later. A 25-by-30 foot area was damaged, she said.

This was the 14th year of the Pink Triangle. The SF fire department says it has no leads in the case.

NY Assemblyman Dov Hikind: No Gays At Holocaust Memorial

New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn), a notorious homophobe who routinely attempts to block LGBT rights legislation, is pissed off because homosexuals and other groups persecuted by the Nazis will be represented at a Holocaust memorial in Hikind's home borough.

Hikind said even though 5 million people from other groups -- including gays, the disabled and Jehovah's Witnesses -- were killed along with 6 million Jewish people during the Holocaust, the memorial in Sheepshead Bay should be for Jews only. "To include these other groups diminishes their memory," said Hikind, as he stood next to his 89-year-old mother, Frieda. He said he is not against a memorial to honor the other groups -- as long as it is somewhere else. "These people are not in the same category as Jewish people with regards to the Holocaust," Hikind said following a press conference at the memorial. "It is so vastly different. You cannot compare political prisoners with Jewish victims."

The NYC Parks Department has already signed off on having markers installed at the memorial noting the murders of gays, Gypsies, and other groups. Mayor Bloomberg has issued a statement in support of the new markers.

Obama At The Holocaust Museum

Yesterday while speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, President Obama mentioned homophobia in a list of "hatred that degrades its victim." Obama:

"To this day, there are those who insist the Holocaust never happened - who perpetrate every form of intolerance — racism, antisemitism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and more — hatred that degrades its victim and diminishes us all. Today, and every day we have an opportunity, as well as an obligation to confront these scourges. To fight the impulse to turn the channel when we see images that disturb us, or wrap ourselves in the false comforts that others' sufferings are not our own."

Video here.

(Via JMG reader Simeon and Towleroad)

Germany Bans PETA's Holocaust Ads

Germany has banned a series of ads by PETA which compares Holocaust victims to animals in slaughterhouses.

The posters, sponsored by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), bear photographs of concentration camp inmates, both alive and dead, along with pictures of plates piled with meat and animals ready for slaughter, accompanied by the slogan: "The Holocaust on your plate." The Constitutional Court decision, reached on February 20 but announced now, said the campaign would have made "the fate of the victims of the Holocaust appear banal and trivial."

The court took the case on behalf of a group of descendants of Holocaust victims.

(Via - JMG reader Marc)

Israel To Get Memorial To Gay Holocaust Victims

Tel Aviv will be the site of Israel's first memorial to the gay victims of the Nazis.

Three iron panels, each 5 meters wide and deep, and partially buried, will form a 3-dimensional triangular pit, from which light will stream. Names of the registered homosexual Nazi victims will be inscribed inside in Hebrew, though the actual number of victims and every name is not known.

"The pit inside the triangle represents the deep well of hatred that homosexuals faced and is a metaphor as the dead-end of being in a concentration camp; the inability to escape," says Pinkas. A dedication will also be inscribed in English. Assouline's design was selected as "the most creative and simple. We did not want something extravagant."

A handful of large-scale Holocaust memorials to homosexuals exist worldwide, including in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and within weeks in Berlin. The "Homomonument" in Amsterdam, designed by Karin Daam, comprised of three triangles in a pink-tone marble, abuts the Anne Frank House and a church.

Tel Aviv will also be host to the world's first LGBT community center entirely financed and run by a local government. The center is scheduled to open on June 1st.