We’ve all done it. We here at DL, and our friends over at DP have both crossed the line from time to time when putting up posts.
The most recent incident occurred a couple of weeks ago when Fay Voshell put up a post at DP that she thought was funny. The post included a video from a movie that included Hitler in it. Except in Fay’s version, Hitler was really President Obama and his advisors were telling him that the Attack Watch website was a failure.
I took exception to the video, in the comments section of Fay’s post and here. And we are not blameless, as back in 2008, we ran a blog post using the very same video to mock the downfall of the economy during W’s regime. (This was before my time here as a contributor).
I find any post that mock’s the Holocaust extremely unsettling. I lost relatives in the camps. My family only found out this information after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of archives in East Germany and the old Soviet Union. Aunts, uncles, and cousins who decided to stay in Eastern Europe when the rest of my family immigrated between 1892-1907 perished.
And now, the Anti-Defamation League has weighed in. In a letter sent to David Anderson, the ADL has advised him that the use of the video was inappropriate. From the letter:
The Delaware Politics website promotes itself as a place “where public policy meets common sense.” We do not see how using this excerpt is consistent with this stated policy. The piece trivializes the Holocaust. It draws inappropriate comparisons that offend the sensibilities of Holocaust survivors and those who appreciate the gravity of one of the most tragic episodes in human history. From our perspective, any use of the Holocaust for political or commercial purposes is off limits.
You may know that the Anti-Defamation League is a human relations agency dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism and hatred, bigotry and prejudice in all forms. Consistent with our mission, we believe there is great value in preserving and perpetuating the proper and correct lessons of the Holocaust. Any use of Holocaust imagery symbols or events should be for these purposes only and not for mercenary manipulative and self-serving objectives.
Anderson probably got the letter because he is an elected official, and we should expect more from out elected officials, whether we agree with their politics or not.
As I said, we here at DL are not blameless in this, as we have posted up videos of the same movie. And it’s just as wrong when we do it. All of us, on both sides of the political divide, need to learn a lesson from this. While we will still call out hypocrisy and wrong-headed ideas from the other side, we need to do it without using images from one of our darkest historical periods.