Jewish human rights scholar: yes, America has built concentration camps

Anna Lind-Guzik ("a writer, attorney, and scholar of Soviet history, international law, and human rights, with degrees from Duke University, Harvard Law School, and Princeton") has written an essay defending Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's use of the term "concentration camps" to describe the facilities in which America has imprisoned brown-skinned asylum seekers who have presented themselves at the nation's border.

Lind-Guzik -- who is Jewish -- points out that the term "concentration camp" predates the Holocaust, and that the US refered to the internment camps where it illegally imprisoned Japanese Americans during WWII as concentration camps. There's no question that as a matter of linguistics, "concentration camp" is the right word for what the US is doing on its border.

More pointedly, Lind-Guzik defends comparisons to the Holocaust, because "the lessons of the Holocaust will be lost if we refuse to engage with them...Locking up refugees in camps is the real betrayal of the legacy of the Holocaust... 'Never again' means we must work to deescalate before atrocities rise to the horrors of Auschwitz."

She closes with this: "In memory of the 6 million Jews who perished because they were considered less human, I will not accept my government treating migrants like animals. And as the daughter of a Soviet Jewish refugee, I will not accept the criminalization of stateless people."

I'm also the son of a Soviet Jewish refugee, and I agree. What's more, as a "white-passing" Jew, I've watched with increasing unease as my fellow Ashkenazis have thrown their lot in with white supremacy, making common cause with white supremacists who support apartheid in Israel as part of a deranged end-times prophecy (liberally salted with racism and Islamophobia) and with white supremacists in the GOP who defend white privilege with every weapon at their disposal. Read the rest