-Caveat Lector-
Some Bristle at Holocaust Parallel
By DEB RIECHMANN
.c The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Clinton draws parallels between what Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic is doing in Kosovo and what Adolf Hitler did in
the Holocaust. But Jewish leaders bridle at the comparison: Nothing, they
say, is like the mass exterminations during World War II.
In a speech to 200 veterans of foreign wars, Clinton spoke of the two
tragedies in the same breath.
Although Milosevic's ``ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic
extermination at the Holocaust, the two are related -- both vicious,
premeditated, systematic oppression fueled by religious and ethnic hatred,''
Clinton said Thursday.
National security spokesman David Leavy says Clinton is not belittling
Hitler's systematic annihilation of 6 million Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.
He's only pointing out the similarities -- forced rapes, mass executions,
erasing of people's identities, Leavy said.
``There is no comparison to the Holocaust in scale and scope,'' he said.
``(But) while it's not of the same magnitude, the Holocaust and what we're
seeing today have similarities.''
Phil Baum, director of the American Jewish Congress, a New York-based human
rights organization, says the crisis in Kosovo is a political conflict with a
political solution. In World War II, there was nothing the Jews could do to
save themselves from the German government's efforts to exterminate them,
Baum said.
``I'm not offended, but it tends to trivialize the Holocaust. It denigrates
the historical meaning of the Holocaust,'' Baum says of the comparison. ``It
reduces it to a political conflict, and that is not what it was. It was an
attempt to destroy the Jewish people.''
Comparing the two is a waste of time, says Hyman Bookbinder, a member of the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council's Committee on Conscience.
``There are some people who feel it's not fair to the victims of the
Holocaust to call it a Holocaust,'' Bookbinder said. ``Nothing is like the
Holocaust, but the fact that it's not exactly like it doesn't matter. It's a
major human rights violation. We must not let the Kosovo tragedy go
unattended.''
Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Peace laureate and author who spoke last month at a
White House lecture series hosted by Clinton, agrees. It's time to stop the
conflict in Kosovo, not discuss whether the crisis is another Holocaust.
Wiesel, who survived Hitler's death camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz, said
the comparisons began in the early 1990s during the war in Bosnia.
``Some reports referred to Auschwitz in Bosnia. I saw the prison camps at
Banja Luka (in Bosnia); the conditions were deplorable and the prisoners
terrified,'' Wiesel wrote recently in Newsweek magazine. ``But it was not
Auschwitz. Auschwitz was an extermination camp, a black hole in history.
Victims were taken there to be turned into ashes. Now we are witnessing a
nightmare in Kosovo; it demands action, not comparison.''
Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., who has relatives who died at Auschwitz, said he
too is appalled by what is happening to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Still,
it's not the Holocaust, says Lantos, who supports NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
``At the end of the line when these poor Kosovo refugees enter Macedonia or
Albania, waiting for them is not extermination ovens and gas chambers, but
food, clothing, medical supplies and airplanes to take them to other parts of
Europe or the United States,'' Lantos said.
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