Rabbi Ari Hier — the Campus Outreach Coordinator at a Holocaust research human rights organization — had the perfect response to the New York University (NYU) professor who has claimed that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a contemporary Adolf Hitler.
Arthur Caplan, a left-leaning Bioethics professor at NYU, co-authored an article on Poynter (as well as tweets incessantly) about the “dangerous” and “proto-Hitlerite” Donald Trump — jumping on the bandwagon of tax-payer funded educators who equate Republican presidential candidates to Germany’s radical mass-murderer and dictator.
Caplan, also NYU’s Director of Medical Ethics, predicted that while it’s easy to say Trump is not likely to win the support of the American public, 1930’s Germany felt similarly about Hitler and he wound up rising to power.
“Can Trump win? It seems unlikely,” the article says. “Of course that is what the media said about a funny-looking spewer of hate with an odd mustache who was dismissed as an awful public speaker and not a serious candidate in Germany in the 1930s.”
Caplan added, “Given a long time to spread racist drivel to a public nervous about preserving their national identity from ‘non-Germans,’ Adolf Hitler won.”
Caplan believes that Trump’s statements regarding illegal immigrants from Mexico are synonymous to Hitler’s infamous rhetoric about the Jewish population.
“When you disparage Mexican-Americans at every turn as the cause of all the country’s woes, and when you have the money to get you message out,” Caplan claimed, “Journalists should take you seriously.”
Because Caplan believes Trump is “dangerous,” he insists that the media and the GOP should be condemned for allowing Trump’s rhetoric to spread lightly, and not viewing him as a danger to our country.
“Let’s take Donald Trump seriously,” he wrote. “Treating him as a clown rather than a candidate gives him permission spew hate.”
In addition to his article, Campus Reform published some of Caplan’s tweets that continue to try and propagate a sense of fear over Trump and convince the public that Trump is essentially the 2015 equivalent of Hitler.
“Folks, Trump is rite [sic] on the Hitler flightpath,” he has tweeted along with, “Media is Fueling…a race baiting, evil, photo-Hitlerite by treating him like a buffoon.”
And in some tweets, Caplan’s mission to induce public fear and panic regarding Trump’s presidential candidacy is a little bit more obvious.
“All trump is missing are brownshirts,” Caplan tweeted. “He has all the rest. Dismiss him as a buffoon or a joke at the nation’s peril.”
And Caplan is not the only left-winged professor who believes that Republican leaders in 21st century America are synonymous to the notorious dictator who is responsible for the genocide of European Jews.
Sara Goldrick-Rab, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, made national headlines earlier this month for using Twitter to denounce Republican Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate Scott Walker.
“My grandfather, a psychologist, just walked me through similarities between Walker and Hitler,” the tax-payer funded educator tweeted. “There are so many — it’s terrifying.” (RELATED: HERE ARE THE TWEETS The Wisconsin Professor Sent To Random Freshmen After Comparing Scott Walker To Hitler)
While the far left may appreciate the casual nature in which educators like Caplan and Goldrick-Rab equate presidential candidates — with whom they politically disagree — to Hitler, individuals of the Jewish community are not taking it so lightly.
“Unless a person is mean and cruel in a genocidal way,” Rabbi Hier, an executive at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Daily Caller in an interview, “I think making that comparison detracts and takes away from the cruelty of Hitler.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is a global human rights organization based in Los Angeles that studies and teaches the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in a contemporary context to confront hared towards Jews.
Rabbi Hier says that drawing analogies between Nazi Germany and other genocidal mass-murders is valid and understandable, but to compare Hitler to GOP presidential candidates shows not only gross insensitivity to Jews, it also shows a lack of common sense.
“It shows a lack of sensitivity, a lack of rigorous logic, a lack of the ability to analogize properly, and it certainly detracts from the Holocaust,” he stated. “But I’m not ready to say that they’re making these analogies because they really hate Jews.”
The rabbi affirmed that the misuse of analogies to Hitler are a widespread phenomenon that extend to professional arenas other than just politics. But Caplan and Goldrick-Rab’s Twitter antics are more indicative of the professors than of the candidates they’re chastising.
“Look, when you call Donald Trump Hitler, that is such an egregious misuse of hyperbole and says more about the professor than it does about Donald Trump,” Hier told The Daily Caller. “It just tells me how crazy that professor is.”
“Until Donald Trump starts shipping people to concentration camps, that’s just an outrageous misuse of analogy.”
