Dear J. Kb.
Your faith cannot be destroyed. Faith is something personal, internal and held by your soul. Strangers waiving the flag of the same religion can come do and say  things that makes you doubtful, but in the en they really do not have control over what is in your soul unless you let them.

I am a Catholic. If you want to talk about people having issues with faith, come and see us for examples. We have had some great Popes like John Paul II and a really shitty one sitting right now in the Vatican. We had sordid scandals and yet we are still here and a faith because we know we are the Church, not an edifice, not some guy in robes. Our faith is The Holy Church.

In Mathew 16:18, Jesus tells Peter:

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Even for somebody as dense as me when I was a kid trying to stay awake during catechism classes, I understood that Jesus was not speaking literally but founding what’s to come on man, not temples, not organization but the individual and his faith.  I found a similar passage from the Torah online:

יִשְׂמַח יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּעוֹשָׂיו פֵּירוּש שֶׁכָּל מִי שֶׁהוּא מִזֶרַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יֵשׁ לוֹ לִשְׂמוֹחַ בְּשִׂמְחַת ה’ אַשֶׁר שָׂשׂ וְשָׂמֵחַ בְּדִירָתוֹ בְּתַּחְתּוֹנִים

“The Jews should rejoice in their Maker. Every Jew should share in G‑d’s joy, who rejoices and is happy in His dwelling in this world.” [Tanya Ch. 33]

Every Jew, no matter what sort of background or learning he has had until now, even until a minute ago, so long as he is a Jew, is a member of the Jewish people; and he should be happy and proud that Hashem has given him the special and greatest mission he could have — to make himself, make his home and make the world around him, a place where G‑d is at home.

And to close with a venial sin: F*** that asshole rabbi. You are the Faith.

PS: I had much stronger words, but I figure this required a delicate touch. That means my Delicate Tank is empty and doe not get refilled till next year.

An article from Hey Alma was recommended for review.

I read it.  It missed the point by a Kentucky mile, written by another Jew with a moral compass that can’t find north.

AOC SAID THERE ARE CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN THE U.S. IS SHE RIGHT?

I’m going to skip past the Tweets for evidence and just bullet point the list.

ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF THE COMPARISON:

1. The historical argument
Let’s just look at history: Before there were ever death camps (where Jews were murdered), there were concentration camps. As Holocaust and genocide studies historian Waitman Wade Beorn told Esquire, “Concentration camps in general have always been designed — at the most basic level — to separate one group of people from another group.” Concentration camps are also part of American history — Japanese Americans were relocated and detained in them during World War II.

2. Semantics are B.S.
As many people have pointed out, this argument over semantics has significantly derailed the real conversation we should be happening about these horrific policies.

3. Let’s focus on the actual issue.
Speaking of semantics, if you’re more offended by a term used to describe a policy than the policy itself, it may be time to rethink your priorities. A pretty straightforward argument.

4. People are dying.
Just read any coverage of migrant children dying in Border Patrol custody. At this point, anyone trying to defend the policy is deeply misguided.

5. The Nazis didn’t invent concentration camps.
The English term “concentration camp” was first used to refer to camps set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years War in 1868. While many people now largely associate the term with Nazi concentration camps, this argument holds that you can compare what’s happening to concentration camps without referencing the Holocaust at all.

6. What’s happening is the literal definition of a concentration camp.

7. The Holocaust was evil, but not uniquely evil.

8. “Never Again is now.”
This is something that’s been floating around a lot — it basically means that “Never Again,” the phrase many Jewish communities echo when talking about the Holocaust, needs to be taken into consideration right now. We need to act now to prevent genocide from happening again in the future.

ARGUMENTS AGAINST USING THE COMPARISON:

1. By comparing this to the Holocaust, it lets the Trump Administration off the hook.

2. Invoking the Holocaust distracts from the real problem.
This is similar to the above argument — instead of focusing on the current horror, we’re getting caught up in a semantics debate. By not using the Holocaust/concentration camps, this problem is avoided.

3. The Holocaust was unique.

4. It’s a stretch, but we should still be outraged.
As this argument goes, what’s happening today is very much worthy of your outrage, but it’s simply not at concentration levels yet.

5. These kind of centers have existed for a while, including under Democratic presidents.

6. If you really think they’re concentration camps, do something.

This article is total and complete dog shit that missed the fucking point.

At this point, I believe that I have gotten too wrapped up in the semantic argument.

Here is the fucking point:

The Holocaust.  The Armenian Genocide.  Soviet Gulags.  The killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.  The Boer concentration camps of Colonial Africa.

I’ll throw in the Rwandan genocide, the Trail of Tears, and the Soviet Holodomor as well.

All of these events have something in common.

All of them centered around the deliberate and systematic, rounding up, imprisonment, torture, and mass slaughter of minority groups of people because of their ethnicity, religion, tribal affiliation, or political opinion.

The purpose was singular: collective punishment.  To eliminate a minority group through extermination or total subjugation.

The internment of the Japanese by the US (and Canada) during WWII fit most of that mold but stopped before torture and extermination.

So when it comes to immigrant detention centers on our southern borders, here is (are) the question(s) that must be asked.  This is the determination of where your moral compass points.

Do you believe that the immigrant detainment centers on our border fit the mold of previous genocides?

Do you believe that Border Patrol and INS are engaged in the systematic rounding up, imprisonment, torture, and potentially mass slaughter of immigrants from Central and South America because of their skin color, race, ethnicity, or national origin, and then the purpose of these camps is the collective punishment of Hispanic/Latino people?

Intention matters.  Full consent of the will is one of the differences between a venial sin and a mortal sin.  Is the intention of the detention camps to be the collective punishment and torture of minority people who come across our southern border?

If the answer to that question is “yes” then it is your assumption is that any and all supporters of any sort of law enforcement on our southern border are tantamount to Nazis.

At that point, the conversation is over.  You have assumed that people on the other side of the aisle from you are all the worst sorts of human beings.

You have assumed that the poor conditions that these people experience is the result of racist maliciousness and not resource constraints.

This is why I find this question so offensive and this debate so hateful.  It accuses the men and women of America’s Federal law enforcement and the people who support them of being morally equivalent to Nazis.

The reality is every month, there are more than 100,000 people crossing our southern border. Most speak no English.  They have no money and no job skills.  Many have communicable diseases that have been eradicated in the United States.  How do these people integrate into the United States and not end up homeless on American streets?  How much financial responsibility do American taxpayers and tax-funded social welfare programs have to take care of these people?  What is the upper limit of new people we can put onto these programs before they collapse?  Should there be a process to vet the people crossing our border to determine which ones are truly deserving of asylum and which ones are not?  

The “detention centers are concentration camps” position allows the person making that argument to wave away all of those concerns as just evil, racist, white supremacists, Naziesque talking points because moral people do not support concentration camps.  The only moral option is to set every single one of those people free.

I believe that making the assumption that American Federal law enforcement and the people who support border security are as evil as Nazis is the sign of a broken moral compass.  It is wrong to assume the absolute worst of other people without evidence.

Congresswoman did this in her video when she said to the effect of “if you don’t agree with me that these are concentration camps you are a bad person and not worth talking to.”

This debate is a microcosm of the position we have seen Social Justice take on America as a whole.

Do you believe that America is an inherently racist nation, filled with irredeemably racist people, that engages in the systematic oppression of every non-white group all the time and everywhere?

Or…

Do you believe that America is a nation founded on good valued, that is inhabited by imperfect people and occasionally makes mistakes, and while there is always room for improvement, it is fundamentally a good place?

I have the feeling that most of the “detention centers are concentration camps” crowd believes in the former.

I believe in the latter.

Could the conditions for these people be better?  Yes, of course.  That requires funding and resource allocations.  That is a discussion to be had.

To have that discussion, the first step is to stop calling detention centers are concentration camps and by extension presuming that every single person who supports any form of border enforcement is evil and a Nazi.

From Fox News:

Scandal-scarred Roy Moore announces new Senate bid, despite GOP protests

Roy Moore, the scandal-scarred Republican who lost a 2017 bid for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, announced Thursday he will run again for Senate next year, despite President Trump and other conservatives in Washington insisting he can’t win.

“Yes, I will run for the United States Senate in 2020,” Moore said during a defiant announcement in Montgomery, after railing against the Republicans who have said they oppose him running.

As if the 2020 election wasn’t going to be a nuclear dumpster fire already.

I’m going to watch this for a bit, but I’ll tell you what.

I’m a United States citizen over the age of 30, a resident of the state of Alabama, and a registered Republican.

If nobody else worth a shit tries to stop Moore, I’ll run against him.

I think the biggest problem I’m going to have is that I’m too honest, and it’s going to be hard for me not to refer to other politicians as “that stupid fuck.”

Possibly the best way to close the whole argument is this video from  Live in Aspen show from 1998. I remember seeing it live and it has stuck with me ever since for it sheer absurdity. Then again Monty Python was telling a joke and AOC is serious

Via Legal Insurrection:

Democrat Aide Who Doxxed Republicans During Kavanaugh Hearings Headed to Prison

Almost a year ago, we witnessed the weeks-long drama of hearings to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. While progressive outrage theater transpired on the streets of DC and Democrats in the chamber made fools out of themselves, a very serious crime unfolded behind the scenes.

A Democrat aide named Jackson Cosko, who was angry about Kavanaugh, stole private information about Republican senators and made it public. Now he is going to jail.

Cosko is from a family of means, and his parents did what they could for him, offering to pay for his stay at a mental health facility, but the prosecutors in the case were intent on sending a message.

I hope canteen privileges include Preparation H.  It os going to be a long four years for pasty faced SJW.

I have always been a proud Jew.  Proud of who I am and proud of the legacy of accomplishments of the Jewish people.  It’s always been an intrinsic part of who I am.

No antisemite has ever been able to shake me from my faith.  I was raised to respond to antisemitic remarks with (in so many words) “I’m your huckleberry.”

It took a Rabbi to make me want to stop being a Jew.

The Comments made by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that the immigrant detainment centers on our southern border are concentration camps is evil.  Plain evil.

People rushed to defend her comments, with arguments about the concentration camps of the Boer War in Africa, Japanese internment, or “not all concentration camps were death camps.”

They can point to the dictionary definition of concentration camp all they want, the fact is that the idea, the mental image, the concept that Americans have of the word concentration camp is places like Auschwitz or Dachau, Nazi concentration camps that worked, starved, or gassed to death six million Jews.

Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the phrase concentration camp was deliberate, to invoke the visceral emotions that people have about the Holocaust in regards to immigrant detainment.

To say “well technically she’s right because she said ‘concentration camp’, not ‘death camp’ is deliberately disingenuous.

So much so that various Jewish and Holocaust memorials condemned this rhetoric, including the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Auschwitz Memorial, and Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

I couldn’t understand how Ocasio-Cortez’s comments didn’t receive near-universal condemnation.

Then I read this OpEd in the Washington Post from Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg.

‘Never again’ means nothing if Holocaust analogies are always off limits

The Holocaust was suddenly in the center of U.S. political discourse early this week. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) referred on social media to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention centers as concentration camps, which provoked a backlash from conservatives and then a flood of support from liberals. And #Kristallnacht trended on Twitter on Monday night after President Trump tweeted that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will soon step up its work “removing the millions” of undocumented immigrants, seemingly signaling an escalation of his administration’s tactics aimed at migrants.

Are these analogies just? Is it really reasonable to compare what’s happening with immigrants under Trump to the Third Reich? Or should the Holocaust be off-limits for comparisons to current events?

As a big believer in Never Again, absolutely we should be able to compare things to the Holocaust.  However, the moral imperative is to do so honestly, not for the purpose of ginning up outrage with inflammatory rhetoric.  We need to have standards, preferably objective standards, to use in this comparison.

Otherwise, Holocaust comparisons just become a tool for hacks to use to browbeat their opposition with outrage from a position of false superiority.

If done with caution, those analogies can be useful. Looking at Holocaust history — thoughtfully, carefully — can help us to see the parallels between then and now. It can also help us to understand when those parallels are not apt, and what that does and doesn’t mean about news as it breaks.

What Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and her followers have done is neither thoughtful or careful.

Of course, analogies are imperfect, and every situation has its own nuances and context, but looking at monstrous events of the past can help us understand where we are in ways that can be difficult to see in the day-to-day.

The problem is this Rabbi and the people calling the detention centers concentration camps are going to nuance these differences into irrelevance.

Some who criticize drawing parallels between the United States today and Germany of the 1930s suggest that doing so demeans the memories of the Jews, political dissidents, LGBT, disabled and Romani people and others targeted by the Nazis — that not every instance of oppression is genocide, and using this kind of language diminishes the suffering under Hitler.

Yes, it does.  Absolutely it does.

But the Holocaust didn’t begin with gas chambers, and it’s not business as usual in America right now. We already know that the path to atrocity can be a process, and that the Holocaust began with dehumanizing propaganda, with discriminatory laws, with roundups and deportations, and with internment. Those things are happening in our country now, and they’re known as some of the stages of genocide first articulated by Genocide Watch in 1996.

This is exactly what I was saying about nuancing this debate into meaningless terms.

Show me one, one cartoon published on Fox News that looks anything like how Der Strurmer. depicted the Jews.  Show me one cartoon from any major US media outlet that shows immigrants from Central America as rats or octopuses, or as ugly and grotesque caricatures.

The term Illegal Immigrant is not dehumanizing, it is a statement of fact as per someone’s immigration status.  “No person is illegal” is a thought-terminating cliche.  Identifying someone’s immigration status is not equivalent to the word the Nazis used for the Jews, Untermensch, which translates to sub-human.  Absolutely nobody on the mainstream right is accusing these migrants of being genetically inferior or polluting the superior American race.

Yes, Trump and other Republicans have talked about the dangers illegal immigrant gang members pose to the American public.  That is not a topic of ethnic superiority.  That is an issue of people taking advantage of our border situation to smuggle in narcotics that contribute to the 70,000 overdose deaths per year.

Show me the Jewish gangs in Weimar Germany smuggling in narcotics or stabbing and dismembering teenagers in Berlin.

On the one hand, we have people targets because of their religion, portrayed as subhuman parasites, and targeted for extermination.

On the other, we have people who are identified by the fact that they knowingly broke the laws of this land and are to be arrested and held until a trial determines their punishment.

This is the same for #Kristallnacht trending on Twitter.  Kristallnacht was not carried out exclusively by German police.  It was a pogrom.

Show me the mob of MAGA hat wearing patriots looting Latino owned business, burning the homes of Latinos, raping Latina women and beating Latino men.  Show me anything that looks like a pogrom taking place in any Hispanic community in the United States.

Kristallnacht is a far cry from law enforcement arresting people with warrants for violating Federal law, not for their skin color or ethnicity.

To nuance away the differences here is pure evil.

Having a historical reference point can help us understand our own moral obligations in this story and to make sense of it as it unfolds. Whether it has or ever will reach the stage of ultimate atrocity is not the question. What we should be asking is how articulating parallels can help us to see where we are, with clarity, now.

Not just are we not at the stage of ultimate atrocity, we’re not even close to the beginnings of it.  Absolutely nobody is even remotely suggesting we remove all people of Hispanic heritage from the United States.  The people being detained are not being detained because of some intrinsic characteristics.  They have every right to apply for asylum in the United States but in accordance with our laws.  Not in the fashion they are doing.

Is CBP running concentration camps? Several recent articles have made the case that they are, using a definition from Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps”: “mass detention of civilians without trial.”

These are literally people waiting for a hearing.

But it is important to note that Nazi concentration camps — which, in Germany, began in 1933 — and the Holocaust’s death (or “extermination”) camps, which began in 1941, are not the same thing, though they’re often conflated in American discourse. And what we now know of the CBP camps does not include many of the hallmarks often associated with Nazi camps — forced labor, for example, or the detention of U.S. citizens. But it’s also true that the earliest camps — known as “wild camps” — were makeshift centers that did not have the infrastructure of later state camps.

So the Rabbi here can tell that there is a difference but dismisses it anyway.

Concentration camps have a history beyond just the Nazis, too. Pitzer’s definition also puts CBP centers in the context of other such camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union and, of course, here in the United States during World War II, targeting Japanese Americans. (Those who quibble that “internment camps” are not “concentration camps” might note that both President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harold Ickes, his secretary of the interior, referred to U.S. camps as the latter.)

I doubt that most of the people backing up Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez knew about the Boer War before it became a “well actually” talking point.  We’ve seen people in the Left defend Gulags.  Most Democrats fall over themselves to praise the Progressive nature of FDR.  Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez themselves modeled their platforms after FDR’s New Deal.  If George Washington or Thomas Jefferson can be unpersoned from American history for owning slaves 200 years ago, why do the Democrats get a free pass to invoke the greatness of FDR even though he signed the executive order to inter the Japanese?

The point of using the phrase “concentration camp” in America was to create outrage by making people equate border detention centers to what they saw in Schindler’s List.

And the Holocaust isn’t the only analogy that can or should be in play now; it’s a chaotic, complicated time, and we need a lot of lenses to make sense of it. As the writer Kelly Hayes argues: “The U.S. doesn’t need foreign models for manufactured conditions that dehumanize and bring about premature death. From slavery to death marches, Native reservations and the prison system, this is all very American.”

Still, Tornillo doesn’t have to be Auschwitz — a death camp — for it to be a concentration camp. Analogies don’t have to be perfect to be instructive. Here, they help us to see how grave and urgent the situation is.

They don’t have to be perfect, but they also can’t be apples and hockey pucks.

Most of the time, we start making references to the Holocaust only when a conflict has already escalated to full-on genocide — Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur, the recent massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. But now we’re not reacting as we watch authoritarianism escalate halfway around the world, but rather feeling the water heat up while we’re sitting in the pot.

I agree, but again, there have to be objective standards.

“Enter the country legally, there is an established process, follow it” is not a prelude to genocide.

That still doesn’t mean that every analogy is equally fitting. Was “the next Kristallnacht” really announced on Twitter? Probably not. Among other things, reporting this week indicates that it’s unlikely that operations as large-scale as Trump suggested are ready to launch in the coming weeks, or that ICE has the staff or budget to carry out what he indicated.

But even if we — God willing — never get anywhere near the later stages of genocide, never reach the monstrosity of the Third Reich, these analogies can and should serve as our moral compass. We have long asked the question about why good Germans didn’t intervene earlier, when it was “just” about discriminatory laws, detention, boycotts. Before things got murderous.

“I don’t like this guy so I’m going to call him Hitler” is not on our moral compass.  Major voiced in the Democrat party and on the Political Left have been crying “Hitler” for three years.  This concentration camp travesty is an extension of that.

Now we have to ask ourselves: Why aren’t we?

Because nothing, from the rhetoric to the actions, is similar to what happened in Nazi Germany.  Anne Frank had to hide in an attic to avoid being sent to a concentration camp.  Her German neighbors would have been shot if they were found to have been harboring Jews.

Illegal immigrants in California are given in-state tuition and scholarships to California state colleges.

It’s not the same situation at all.

There was massive public outcry against the Department of Homeland Security’s family separation policy last summer, but the policy has nonetheless continued. There have been some protests against the detention camps, but they haven’t been loud or sustained.

We know that some Border Patrol agents refer to immigrants as “tonks” — defined in court documents as the sound heard when agents hit immigrants in the head with a flashlight and “that it is part of the [Tucson Border Patrol’s] agency’s culture.”

That’s bad if true.

We know immigrants are being held in “dog pounds” and “freezers,” that detainees are being held in facilities meant for one-fifth the number of people, in soiled clothing and with limited access to showers.

Freezers being air-conditioned buildings kept at 72 degrees.  Just because the people there are not used to AC doesn’t make it a crime against humanity.

The conditions, as bad as they might be, are the result of a lack of funding and policies that attract over 100,000 people per month into a situation designed for a tenth of that number.  That is different in every way from the deliberate starvation of the Jews in concentration camps, or the Boers in Africa, or the Arminians in Turkey.

We know that at least 24 people have died in ICE custody under the Trump administration so far, and at least six children under the care of other agencies have died since September. We know that ICE has stopped updating its official “List of Deaths in ICE Custody” page, and we know of at least one child death that wasn’t reported to the public at the time it happened.

This is the worst of the distortions.  Sick people have crossed our borders and died while in custody, after receiving medical care.  Our law enforcement can’t be blamed for the conditions that people, including children, experienced on the trek across the Sonoran Desert to get to the United States.

Every situation is different. But thinking about the Holocaust now can remind us of the urgency of this situation, fuel us to protest, to donate money to organizations on the front lines, to call our members of Congress and demand that they slash the budget for ICE and CBP, to center this as the human rights emergency that it is.

Slashing the budget of ICE and CBP will hurt more people, not help them.

That is the biggest difference here.  Every other genocide or human rights violation was the result of maliciousness and evil directed at the victim group.  The Nazis hated the Jews and wanted to exterminate them.  The Turks hated the Armenians.  The English wanted the land the Boers settled.

The migrants are not being targeted out of malicious hatred.

This is not a program of ethnic cleansing. This is a reaction to a crisis of hundreds of thousands of people trying to enter the United States in violation of our laws.

Anyone unable to tell apart an intentional genocide from a cash strapped response to a humanitarian crisis has lost their moral compass.

Recalling the terrible lessons of the Holocaust does not disgrace the memory of that atrocity, does not harm the victims of it decades later. Quite the opposite: One of the best ways to honor the memories of those murdered by the Nazis is to take profoundly to heart the Jewish community’s long-held mantra: never again.

It disgraces the memory of that atrocity if the two situations are nothing alike and political partisanship is the only metric for telling good from evil.

Many survivors know the analogy is apt. Never again means never again. And never again also means now.

The analogy is not apt, no matter how much one might hate President Trump.

As a believer in Never Again, this is offensive beyond words.

A moral compass that does not account for the truth is a moral compass that is broken.  If the purpose of Never Again is to address the threat of a potential dictator or genocidal madman, then we must consider the facts critically.

This is not that.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is a popular Rabbi.  She’s written several books.  She had a social media following.  She’s a syndicated columnist.

She has been hailed as the future of the American Rabbinate.

Her moral compass points to “Orange Man Bad.”

Frankly, I don’t give a shit about Trump.  He got elected, he might get elected again, he will be done in four or eight years, and that’s it.

What I care about is the truth.  I care about being able to analyze situations based on facts, intentions, and rationality.

Biblical teachings tell us that, despite what Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez says, it is not possible to be factually wrong and morally right.

This is how we get the Rabbinate that looks at an overwhelmed response to mass violations of the law and sees Naziesque concentration camps, then defends a Muslim member of the House engaging in antisemitic rants.

Judaism is a religion based on certain values that have held our people together for almost 6,000 years.  In a very short time, Rabbis like Danya Ruttenberg has turned it into “Intersectional Progressives who don’t eat pork.”

If that is the future of Judaism, if abandoning a search for truth over partisanship what we are to become, I can’t be a part of that.

“Outraged” means raped.

This is the part of the research I hate: Child murders. My imagination is pretty god and when I come across stories like this (and back then they did not spare details) it puts me in a seriously bad mood. I also understand why lynchings were so common when dealing with stuff like that: No police to speak off and no true homicide investigators, with luck a smart local sheriff that may happen to find himself dealing with a depraved but dumb murderer who left enough clues to be found and arrested. Later the night of the arrest, the locals would pay a visit to the jail and convince the deputy (mostly at gunpoint) to let them have the prisoner for nighttime festivities.

And before you lose your minds, one of the things I have also learned in this research is to hate lynchings. Angry people gathered in a mob fueled by rage, commit some of the most barbaric crimes you can imagine.

Evil has not changed, it just changed clothes and means.