Griper Blade: Censoring the Lessons of History

Today's manufactured outrage of the day, brought to you by the New York Post:

Anthony Weiner has come under intense fire from Jewish leaders for invoking Nazi Germany while criticizing the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program.

“Last year, more than 700,000 in New York were stopped — the overwhelming majority of them were young men of color. Ninety-seven percent of them did nothing wrong,” Weiner told largely black congregants in Staten Island’s First Central Baptist Church Sunday.

“And the mayor stood up and said, ‘Wait a minute, statistically this’ and ‘statistically that.’ Well, you can have 100 percent statistical reduction in crime if you stop everybody.

“You could have 1938 Germany, because everyone has to show their papers.”

Apparently, it's terribly offensive to compare a minority population subjected to police state tactics to another minority population subjected police state tactics. Although, I get the feeling that NYP, being a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, is grossly overstating the situation, cherry-picking their outraged Jewish leaders (who were likely Weiner opponents to begin with) and ignoring the ones who support him. It seems to me that the lessons of the Holocaust are lost if they're never applied. And to attack anyone who draws a historical parallel to one of the modern world's greatest crimes is to guarantee that those lessons are never applied -- and therefore, never learned. No one's saying "stop and frisk" is the Holocaust -- or even that it's anything approaching genocide -- merely that it's totalitarianism...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]