Ex-CIA Chief Compares Trump’s Border Security to Holocaust
By Chris Agee
June 19, 2018 at 8:36am
The Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy has attracted bipartisan criticism in recent weeks, particularly over reports of children being separated from their parents during preliminary investigations.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden was one of many prominent Americans — including all four living former first ladies — to speak out against the Department of Justice policy.
Many Twitter users felt he went too far, however, by referencing the Holocaust in his denunciation.
“Other governments have separated mothers and children,” he wrote as the caption to an image of Birkenau, the largest of dozens of concentration camps located inside the Auschwitz complex in what is now Poland.
TRENDING: Mark Levin Calls for Special Counsel To Investigate Comey The retired U.S. Air Force general was almost immediately bombarded with criticism from those offended by his comparison.
Writer Pardes Seleh called it a “dumb comparison,” pointing out that the families separated during the Holocaust were legal residents who were then tortured or killed.
Devout Jew and conservative commentator Ben Shapiro called the tweet “insulting and absurd.”
“Just a reminder: the Nazis separated mothers from children and then gassed all the kids and nearly all of the mothers,” Shapiro wrote.
Others took a more sympathetic tone to Hayden’s warning, arguing that it is helpful to remember the atrocities of the Holocaust to avoid repeating the same policies that allowed it to take place.
Hayden retweeted several such responses, adding that he intended his original post to serve as a warning, not a direct comparison.
“How do people not get we need to prevent what happened in these camps,” one user wrote. “It’s the slide to something like Birkenau is what you’re warning against.”
Hayden responded that he “thought it was obvious too.”
He later tweeted the same image as before with a different caption.
“This is Birkenau,” he wrote. “Then Germany. Now Poland. NO ONE who now walks through that portal on that siding can casually believe that civilized behavior is guaranteed.”
Poster Comment:
Nazi racial laws had a lot to do with who was sent to those work camps.
Tweets at source.