I love Rabbi Ari Hier. I just can’t help it. He’s such a mentch.
From DailyCaller.com: 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.”
…“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.”
