Culture

Splinter News blasts Holocaust Museum for 'dreadful intervention in the concentration camp debate'


Splinter News felt the wrath of the Twitter ratio on Monday after blasting the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “dreadful intervention” into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “concentration camps” debate.

Rafi Schwartz, a senior writer at the Univision-owned website, wrote a piece accusing the museum of “willfully craven pearl-clutching” for its rebuke of people comparing modern-day events to the Holocaust.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has faced widespread criticism for repeatedly accusing the U.S. government of running “concentration camps” on the southern border. She has refused to apologize for her use of the term, saying she is “calling these camps what they are because they fit squarely in an academic consensus and definition.”

The Holocaust museum on Monday condemned “recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.”

Mr. Schwartz said the museum’s statement “managed to wholly undercut its ostensible reason for existing,” which is to educate the public in hopes to prevent another atrocity in the future.



“As Ocasio-Cortez herself explained, concentration camps are not the sole province of Nazis,” Mr. Schwartz wrote. “It’s the museum itself (along with plenty of bad-faith Republicans) that made the leap from ‘concentration camps’ to ‘Holocaust analogy’ without for a moment recognizing — or at least admitting — the term’s well-established historical independence from the Nazi’s treatment of European Jewry. And by doing so, they’ve essentially demanded the world abide by their interpretation of her words solely for the purpose of publicly rejecting them.

“Thankfully, there are plenty of people who aren’t so blinkered by political point-scoring or self-serving interests that they can’t see the plain facts laid out in front of them,” he continued. “Concentration camp experts, internment camp survivors like actor George Takei, and even the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials have all gone on the record to decry the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants as being eminently comparable to Nazi Germany’s treatment of marginalized communities in the ramp-up to World War Two.”

Splinter’s tweet promoting Mr. Schwartz’s article on Monday night sparked a wave of criticism, earning only 15 retweets and a whopping 590 replies as of this writing.

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