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Huckabee’s ‘Holocaust’ Analogy Has ADL Angry, Abortion Foes Yawning
HIS HOLOCAUST: Echoing language used commonly by evangelicals, presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee compared legalized abortion to a holocaust,drawing ire from some Jewish communal leaders.
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More in NewsRepublican presidential contender Mike Huckabee emerged from the recent Values Voter Summit with a new wave of support from Christian conservatives, but he also garnered some unwanted attention from Jewish leaders incensed over his use of the word “holocaust.”
In his address before the conference, hosted in Washington last month by the conservative Family Research Council, the former Arkansas governor and longtime Baptist minister linked abortion — a bedrock issue of the religious right — with the Holocaust.
“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our work force,” Huckabee said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our work force had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”
Jarring as Huckabee’s formulation may have sounded to Jewish ears — the Anti-Defamation League swiftly issued a statement saying that the comparison could “only trivialize and diminish the horror” — several authorities on evangelical Christianity told the Forward that the metaphor is not unusual in the evangelical world.
“I’m surprised that it’s considered controversial when that is a common reference,” said Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Working Families, which is headed by evangelical leader Gary Bauer. “Among pro-lifers, both events are seen as tragic, but the death toll now from abortion is between 40 and 50 million in the United States since 1973. Now that’s a huge number of people who are dead and gone.”
But while Huckabee’s hard-right positions on such issues as abortion, evolution and homosexuality have endeared him to Christian conservatives — and possibly cost him a few Jewish friends — the renewed buzz around his campaign, some commentators say, stems equally from the candidate’s ability to address a broader set of issues, including poverty and public health.
According to a poll published earlier this week by the University of Iowa, 11.4% of Iowa Republicans support Huckabee, which places him in a statistical tie with Rudy Giuliani for second place after Mitt Romney, who garnered 36.2%. In August, Huckabee captured less than 2% in an identical poll.
The former governor also has captured the imagination of the press corps’ mainstream conservatives as of late. “Mr. Huckabee is the most normal person running for president,” proclaimed David Brooks of The New York Times in one recent exuberant column.
D. Michael Lindsay, a professor at Rice University who has studied evangelical leaders extensively for his new book, “Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite,” said that Huckabee represents a “cosmopolitan” breed of evangelical out of step with such powerful “populists” as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson.
In other words, Lindsay said, it was quite possibly Huckabee’s initial reluctance to focus his campaign solely on the religious right’s bedrock issues that got him off to a slow start with his natural evangelical base.
“Evangelicals have often become known for emphasizing two subjects — abortion and homosexuality — and Huckabee rightly believes that evangelical discourse should be much broader that that,” said Marvin Olasky, a conservative columnist and onetime Bush adviser credited with coining the phrase “compassionate conservatism.”
Asked if he approved of Huckabee’s use of the word “holocaust,” Olasky, who was born Jewish but converted to Christianity in his mid-20s, said he believed the word was “objectively” accurate and was used by Huckabee “honestly and respectfully.”
Nevertheless, Olasky said, he could not help feeling “subjectively uncomfortable” with the word’s adoption by those who oppose legalized abortion. “Does it take away from the capital “H” Holocaust?” he wondered. It is “probably” a term best reserved for “the killing of 6 million of our people.”
Comments
this is a whole to do about nothing.as one who has spent over 30-years teaching holocaust studies i find the so-called ''jewish'' reaction overblown and unneeded. the governor is a friend of jewish interests and that should be the criteria in evaluating his qualifications. anything else is absolutely extraneous to our us as they involve a jewish context.
By choosing to call abortion a "holocaust," Huckabee tacitly suggests an identification between supporters of abortion rights and Nazis, and does so in way that singles Jews out for their sense of immediacy concerning this issue. Condoning such blatant deafness to our issues in the name of our interests is evil.
I heard him say it and I must say it really hurt my bowels.
I thought the word "holocaust" was a word found in the dictionary that was available for anyone to use in the context in which it is defined. I didn't realize that groups of people could lay claim to certain words and be offended if someone else used them. Hummmm...you learn something everyday.
Smith, I'm not a group of people. I'm just a person with my opinion, and it's curious to me that, while Huckabee seems entitled to have his, I'm not entitled to have mine.
With all due respect to the people who suffered so greatly during and after the Holocaust, Jews do not have a copyright on the use of the word holocaust. It has been used since the 17th century to refer to the violent death of a large number of people. Mike Huckabee did not refer to THE Holocaust, but to the holocaust of liberalized abortion. What he was saying was that the deaths of 40-50 million people in the last 40 plus years through legalized abortion has had other dramatic, negative consequences for our nation. Consider what the American workforce would look like today if those people had been allowed to live. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize it would have made a difference in our need for immigrant labor and our ability to fund Social Security. The ADL is creating a tempest in a teapot with its criticism. Instead of trying to maintain its own power and influence, it should instead focus on Mike Huckabee's positions with regard to Israel. Go to his website at www.mikehuckabee.com and look at his statements on FOREIGN POLICY:ISRAEL. Then tell me how it benefits the Jewish people to pick a fight with a friend of Israel by generating a controversy over the use of a word.
I am a Christian and truly love the Jewish people. I am sorry that what Gov. Huckabee said has offended you. I am sure he didn't intend to demean in any way what the Jewish people suffered at the hands of the Nazi's. However, in this country we have a problem so serious that words have to be used that sometimes shock people, so that they can wake-up and see the problem as it really is. The US is legally killing it's children, these children may not have a voice yet, but they a real and someone has to be there voice. Per Webster the hohocaust: is wholesale destruction and loss of life, I believe Gov. Huckabee used this word accurately. He was not referring to The Holocaust to which we recognize to be what happened only to the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazi's. I hope that I haven't been offensive in any way, I know as a people you have suffered much and I wouldn't want to in any way add to that.
The Israeli Prime Minister said, a few months ago, that he was an Israeli only after he was a Jew. The Jewish community is wider than Israel, or the issue of Israel, alone. I understand and respect the historical connection evangelicals feel to Israel, in the widest sense of the word - the children of Israel - but friendship, it must be said, consists in more than declarations. It consists also in being able to listen and to act accordingly. As for the reprehensible idea that Jews, in voicing their objections to a politician's willful choice of a loaded English word, are "picking a fight," this seems improbably to mirror the language of self-styled enemies of the State of Israel, who attack civilians and then argue that a wall is uncalled for, or kidnap soldiers and shake their heads in moralizing disapproval over the warlike response it evokes.
JEws aren't the only people who suffered in a holocaust. African people , the Native Americans and other groups of people. Holocaust don't jsut refer to one specific group, it refers to a massive slaughter of people. There is nothing wrong with what he said. I am actually a fan of Mike Huckabee. He is the only candidate that has stand by his believes since he started to campaign. I hope he wins presidency!
Hey, Brad r, I'm not saying you can't have an opinion, I'm just challanging it. Just answer my challange. You were offended that Huckabee used the word "holocaust" and I just wondered why. It's a free word, to be used by anyone who wants to use it. It isnt' a Jewish word. What is the real problem? This doesn't seem to be it.
Besides, Brad, I was addressing Jennifer Siegel, the one who wrote the article, not you. Got a chip?
I don't deny that Huckabee is free to use the word in question; that would be absurd. Equally absurd, however, is what others deny, which is the distinct connotation the word bears in our times. Those who suggest that it is, as it were, a random choice on Huckabee's part are either disingenuous or naive. Like those who supported Bush's war on faith, without evidence, they are confident that anyone who proclaims faith in Jesus is to be trusted without going through the same process of scrutiny that would be brought to bear on any other politician. Huckabee's contention that illegal immigration is a result of "the holocaust of liberalized abortion" is, as far as I am concerned, a viewpoint for which there is no factual support. It does serve to get his name in the news, though, for showing that he is willing to defy the "power and influence" of the ADL, and all the other misguided Jews who will not simply deliver themselves into the hands of those who proclaim that Jesus is Lord.
I'm sorry for picking on you; that was rude. But to ask whether Jews have a chip – or rather, whether I do – over the cavalier use of a word pertaining to the murder of one in three Jews worldwide is really gall.
Unfotunately, as a Democrat, I did not hear Mr.Huckabee use the word Holocaust but I agree with Mr. Olasky. The word does make me uncomfortable since it immediately evokes images I prefer not to se in front of me all that often. However, do we as a people own that word? Did we patent it? After all, the owrd "ghetto" used to evoke images of Warsaw and now, of poverty and slums.
Did Mr. Huskabee use it with a capital 'H' or a small one? That woud make all the difference. Since I h ave not been able to find a transcript of his discourse, I have no idea. I think the ADL jumped the gun on this one. Maybe just a tad fast. In summary, I do not want to believe that he would be that disrepectful to 'US' publically, so 'I' must make allowances for that word to be used in ordinary conversation without immediately allowing it to be related to the "H".
Thank you, A Shenem Dank, Todah Raba. Shabat Shalom.
Please excuse my spelling errors on the above post, I was typing too fast and didn't check carefully enough. Oops!
No doubt the word holocaust (with a small h) can be used many ways. Originally it referred to burnt offerings. The "holocaust of abortion" is a common catchphrase among Catholics and evangelicals in the pro-life movement, and yes, it is meant to invoke the capital-H Holocaust and to invoke visions of the Final Solution.
BTW it is wise to be suspicious of the religious right and its claims to be a friend to Israel and/or the Jewish people.
the dictionary shows four meanings for the word holocaust: 1. a great or complete devastation or destruction, esp. by fire. 2. a sacrifice completely consumed by fire; burnt offering. 3. (usually initial capital letter) the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II (usually prec. by the). 4. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.
its primary meaning has to do with destruction by fire, which was apt, given the way the majority of Jews were disposed of in WWII. it has only come to be accepted in meaning along its #4 meaning, as a mass destruction, later, afterward.
we seem to use Holocaust to exceptionalise the event of the genocide of Jews led by the NAZI party in the mioddle of the 20th centry. because of the community's successful "branding" of the event, everybody now wants to have a holocaust: many have had genocides perpetrated against them but without the aspect of fire, if fails the 'holocaust' test. huckabee's contentious event is properly called 'infanticide' and as there is no element of fire, should not be likened to any holocaust.
we are still very close to the event; in 500 years time, it will probably be known by another name and all these arguements over holocaust or Holocaust will be long forgotten.
one other thing: now, folks are mouning the loss of the "children" who were aborted because they could have contributed to the wealth of the nation. yet i recall that in the past decade, whe crime when down, that downturn was assigned to the fact that the most "undesireable elements" had been aborted, leaving fewer potential crims available to grow up and rob one's house. could the right-wing of the republican party please make up its mind about what or who the lost ones were or would have been?
Brad, you assume too much. That is the present problem you are having with the word "holocaust". My use of the word "chip" pertained to you assuming I was addressing you, hence your quick draw and hair trigger. It wasn't addressed to your knee jerk action "over the cavalier use of a word pertaining to the murder of one in three Jews worldwide".....Try to stay focused, you will do your argument a disfavor otherwise. You look for offense when there aren't any...hence my use of the word "chip". The word "holocust" isn't a jewish word. Huckabee isn't anti-Jewish. Are all Jews this sensitive and looking for offense or are you misrepresenting your people and causing animousity far more than Mike Huckabee could ever do with a word free for any arbitrary use as long as it is used in context of it's meaning? Much to do about nothing? Admit it, you overreacted. Have some class.
I'm vot
oops - accidentally hit the enter key to soon. I meant to say, that I'm voting for Mike Huckabee, and I encourage the rest of the Jewish community to do the same. He's a strong advocate for Israel, he will ease our heavy tax burdens (since we as a community tend to live in high-tax states and towns) and he will use OUR Torah as a basis for values in our country.
Abortion is a holocaust that is "a burning", the babies are literally burnt alive in a saline solution whilst they thrash around in agony. The only moral question is, which is worse, to murder people who have already had a chance at life for several years, or to extinguish them beforehand. Just because, tragically, most American Jews are pro-baby-murder doesn't make the moral question any less relevant.
I admit it, Richard. I overreacted to you.
Thanks, Brad. I'm speechless.....and that's a good thing.
So, if I referred to the prospect of nuclear war as a "nuclear holocaust", would you be offended? Give me a break.
The word holocaust has more meaning than a single definition: The Holocaust (capitalized because it is a proper noun when used to describe the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II). Another definition of the word would be "a mass slaughter of people". Which is what Governor Huckabee sees legalized abortion as being and is how he intended for this to be interpreted.
To say that "the former Arkansas governor and longtime Baptist minister linked abortion — a bedrock issue of the religious right — with the Holocaust" (LINKED and WITH being the key words) is simply false.