Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), demanded Wednesday that the Michigan GOP take down a tweet in which gun control was linked to a disturbing image of the Holocaust.
The tweet, which opposed gun control, referred to the Nazi practice of disarming Jews and political opponents. It included an image of a pile of wedding rings — presumably confiscated from Jews at a concentration camp.
The image included the caption: “Before they collected all these wedding rings … they collected all the guns.”
Brooks responded after another Twitter user, who identified himself as a former volunteer for the Republican Party in Michigan, expressed his dismay that the Michigan GOP had seemed to “normalize” Holocaust imagery.
This tweet by @MIGOP is absolutely inappropriate and offensive and should be taken down immediately. https://t.co/XbsPQluW3B
— Matt Brooks (@mbrooksrjc) March 22, 2023
While there is a historical link between disarming the German citizenry and murdering Jews, the image is highly inflammatory, using the mass murder of European Jews to make a point about U.S. gun control policy.
In general, such imagery is considered exploitative, and offensive. It appears on both sides of the political divide: the left falsely compared then-President Donald Trump’s border enforcement policy to the Holocaust, while some activists used swastikas on signs at a protest against Michigan’s coronavirus lockdown in 2020 — not because they endorsed Nazi antisemitism, but because they wanted to cast the lockdowns as fascist.
When President Joe Biden appointed historian Deborah Lipstadt as his special envoy on antisemitism, critics pointed out that she had abused the Holocaust to defend Democrats’ analogies to Trump during his presidency.
Ironically, Lipstadt had criticized what she called “Holocaust abuse” by politicians seveeal years before that.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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