Posted on 11/21/2010 3:08:06 PM PST by Drango
Abraham Reiss was born at the end of the 19th century near the city of Lviv in modern-day Ukraine. The details of his life are sketchy, and it'll become clear why in a moment. But from the little I know, he lived in a village then called Stanislav.
Abraham owned a small brick factory. He and his wife, Esther, had three children. The youngest was Aryeh.
By the time he became a young man, Aryeh left the village to settle in Palestine. He had witnessed too much hatred and saw what was coming for the Jews of Europe.
For the next four years, he urged his mom and dad, brother Reuben and sister Bronka to join him. But they decided to stay.
Now I wish I could fill in some more details here, but I can't. All I know is that in 1945, Aryeh Reiss received a letter in the mail. Everyone was gone. Killed by the Nazis.
Aryeh was my grandfather, Abraham and Esther my great-grandparents.
For Aryeh's generation of Jews — those who escaped — the stories were similar. Aryeh's wife, Clara, my grandmother, last saw her parents, Menashe and Adela, in the early 1930s. She never found out the name of the concentration camp where they were killed, never had a chance to touch their ashes or visit a mass burial site where their anonymous bodies were tossed with hundreds of others.
I have never seen a photograph of Abraham or Esther or Menashe or Adela. I don't know if my son's blond hair and infectious smile come from any of them.
The details of their lives were wiped out.
What I do know is that they were killed by people motivated by the most extreme and hateful ideology mankind witnessed in the 20th century.
I tell this story because this past week, some of my colleagues here at NPR were called that name. Nazis.
The president of Fox News, Roger Ailes, made those remarks.
I remember when I was sent to Berlin to take up my first foreign posting as an overseas correspondent more than a decade ago. I was at a party with young Germans, and I thought it might make them feel more comfortable if I made a joke describing a hotel clerk I'd run into as a "Nazi."
No one laughed.
And it was the first time I realized that that word — Nazi — means something very real to the millions of Germans who have courageously struggled to come to terms with that legacy for 65 years.
It also means something to the estimated quarter-million Holocaust survivors still alive today with numbers tattooed on their arms.
Nazism was unequivocal. It was depravity. It was bodies buried one on top of the other. It was deliberate, mechanized killing. It was a movement that seized the minds of a segment of humanity.
Just 65 years ago, within the lifetime of many people still alive today, the Nazis killed 1 out of every 3 Jews on the face of the Earth. They destroyed a world and a way of life for millions of people — Jews, Christians and nonbelievers.
That word, Nazi, means something. We are all free to use it as we please. It's our right, of course. But when its use is stripped of any of its real meaning, I just ask you to remember the story of Abraham Reiss.
Nazism is depraved and Progressives, like the Nazis, are herding us down the road to the ovens.
Nobody’s laughing because it is not a joke.
This author could have been writing about the overuse of the word, “racist”, which is another word that has become so stale that nowadays it elicits only rolling eyes and a smirk.
Oh great! So now we have the “N” word and the “n” word. Ain’t that grand?
Problem for the NPR types, it is they and their ilk who are demanding Fox, Rush, Beck, et al be silenced. Gee, just like the Nazis and Communists. Oh, wait the leftists are one of those evil ‘ism’s we keep hearing about.
Controlling, ultimately violent marxists/socialsts.
Openly promote the use of violence to achieve marxist political change under the leadership of a tyrant.
Sound like anything or anyone we know now?
“Always remind the leftists that Nazi is a contraction of National SOCIALIST”
Doesn’t work. I’ve seen this before. If you try explaining to liberals that Nazi means National Socialist, you’ll hear one of the following (all actual posts I found on the net).
“Because as we all know, Hitler wasn’t a liar or anything.”
“North Korea calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, but I don’t recall it being a democracy.”
“The Nazis only used the phrase ‘socialist’ to appeal to the German working class.”
“Hitler did not nationalize private industry, ergo he could not have been a socialist.”
Suffice to say, you’ll never convince the true believers.
Here in America, the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Democrat Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP or simply “the Nazi Party”, or even more simply “Democrats”), use strongarm tactics to remove Christianity from public view, rewrite history, attack traditional cultural institutions like the nuclear family and the Boy Scouts, and destroy scientists and professors who do not toe the line with regard to Democrat doctrine on abortion, embryonic stem cells, evolution, religion, and “global warming”, etc.
Naturally, suppressing opposing opinion through a “fairness doctrine” perfectly fits the Democrats’ modus operandi, and there have recently been rumblings about that obscenity again.
The past two years have seen America get socialist health care rammed down its throat, along with a shameless agenda of reparations and regulatory tyranny. America’s Democrats operate exactly the same way the original version of their party operated in Germany in the 1930s. Of course, Hitler was successful in disarming Germany and that is something Barack Hussein Ubama and the Democrats can only dream about.
The mindless, irrational support that the Democrats receive from liberal Jews in America continues to baffle most normal Americans, but there you go... Stupid is as stupid does, I guess.
Wait a minute! I recall pictures, rendered by those who call themselves “progressives”, of President George W. Bush with swastikas on his lapels and a Hitler mustache during W’s terms in office. These swine have no claim of virtue in this regard.
So will NPR complain the next time when the DU/DailyKos/Moveon.org crowd call a leading Republican a Nazi? You've got to be kidding.
All of which proves Ailes overall point; NPR has a liberal bias, operates under a double standard, and no tolerance for any differing opinions.
Even worse is the mindless, irrational support Muslims receive from liberal Jews.
Yes, Nazism was an evil ideology that murdered several million people (estimated at approx. 10 million) of which six million of them were Jews. I am still waiting for the realization and teaching to the free world that Soviet, Chinese and just about any other communism, murdered ten times that number (60 - 100 million people) and yet it somehow does not seem to mean any where near as much as the Nazi murders. A few thoughts on this; communism and their supporters are still among us, the msm and academic elites have always been sympathetic to the lie of communism, the nazis were defeated militarily and occupied and forced to face tribunals and sentencing for their crimes (and were dumb enough to keep elaborate records of their crimes) while the communists are still in power (China in particular) and where they failed (Russia) they were not pursued for the crimes against humanity even though it is relatively well documented. Can someone explain that to me? If the crimes are of equal or greater depth, and the global community condemns them, then why weren’t the communists prosecuted to any degree? Or at least condemned or exposed for their heinous crimes against innocent people? Well? An enigma that doesn’t seem to have an easy answer or.....
The rule here is that thou shalt never call a leftist a Nazi.
But there's no doubt that a lot of NPR people THINK like the Nazi's did as they attained power.
Yes, they do.
“The president of Fox News, Roger Ailes, made those remarks.”
We should fill this person’s email box with hundreds of examples of his fellow leftists calling the right & FOX the ‘N’ word & ask when he spoke out about it.
Nothing like a little hypocrisy on a Sunday afternoon.
Being a ‘progressive’ means criticizing others for doing the very things that progressives do all the time. Like calling the people that disagree with them ‘nazis’.
http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=612
Fox news needs to air some of these great zombietime photos. And as suggested, we should post the links to NPR.
Didn’t mass murderer Fidel just call the 11/2 Republican Wave ‘fascists’. Where’s the outrage?
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