Spitting on the Holocaust to dampen Islamophobia

Michael L.

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}

The Jerusalem Post tells us:

A University of San Diego professor and some of her students wore yellow star badges modeled after the ones Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust to protest Islamophobia.

Bahar Davary, an Iranian-American associate professor of theology and religious studies at the college, and her students began wearing the yellow stars with the word “Muslim” on them around campus last Thursday. She estimates that over 100 student and faculty members are now wearing the yellow stars on campus.

Davary said, “The yellow Star of David with the word Muslim written on it is a symbol that my students and I wear with utmost respect for the memory of the Jewish lives lost.”

My first inclination is to remind Professor Davary that whatever hell her students must be going through - surrounded by all these murderous, racist white people in Southern California, after all - I imagine it is not quite the same thing as being forced out of one's home, separated from one's family, and dragged off to Treblinka.

Of course, being a full-grown university professor, Davary needs no such reminder.

Davary defended her idea through a university spokesman, telling the Washington Free Beacon that the protest is “not intended to make an analogy between the current situation of Muslims in the US to that of Jews in Germany and wider Europe before the Shoah.”

Fascinating.

So, the analogy is not an analogy, but apparently something else entirely... just what, however, remains a mystery.

According to literarydevices.net:

An analogy is a comparison in which an idea or a thing is compared to another thing that is quite different from it. It aims at explaining that idea or thing by comparing it to something that is familiar.

The University of San Diego is telling international Jewry that the yellow Star of David, as worn by Davary and her students, is merely a way to "raise awareness against Islamophobia," but not an analogy to the Holocaust.

If it were an analogy to the Holocaust it would suggest that Muslims in the United States are going through something similar to the rockin' good time that Jews had in Europe in the early-middle part of the twentieth-century.

Since it is not an analogy to the Holocaust, however, it must mean that the yellow Star of David patch is not meant to evoke the Holocaust.

It must, therefore, be meant either to evoke nothing or to evoke something else, entirely.  Of course, if it is not meant to evoke anything, and is therefore not meant to analogize anything, what would be the point of wearing it?

This being the case, it must be an analogy.  It is meant to convey a comparison of the terrible treatment of Muslims in the United States to something else that can be easily conjured into the mind of the observer... but what?  We already know that the yellow Star of David patch, with the word "Muslim" written across it, is not meant as a Holocaust analogy because the professor has told us so via the university.

That, I suppose, is the question that the University of San Diego, and professor Bahar Davary, will need to answer going forward.  If it was not meant to analogize the Holocaust, just what is its meaning?

Jews are sometimes told by people such as Norman Finkelstein that the Holocaust is an "industry" the product of which is "consumed" by Jewish people for nefarious reasons having to do with gaining power through highlighting the guilt of others.

I find this notion to be something akin to evil because it suggests that the remembrance and honoring of the loss of the 6 million - one-third of our number at the time - is really little more than a ploy to fool the stupid goyim into giving Jews free stuff, such as, for example, a country of our own wherein we can defend ourselves from the friends of Norman Finkelstein.

The fact of the matter is that Davary is an idiot and the University of San Diego is guilty of foisting idiocy upon its students.  The obvious fact is that the yellow Star of David patch - as opposed to the Star (or Shield) of David, in itself - is a highly charged symbol of the Holocaust and for professor Davary to claim that she is not using it in such a manner is disingenuous.

It is a lie.

I have no reason to believe that Davary's intentions are anything but the finest, but this is a hurtful stunt that will do little more than conjure anger and confusion.

How impossibly stupid does the University of San Diego think that Jewish people are?  How impossibly stupid does Davary think that we are?  Of course, the yellow Star of David patch is a symbol of the Holocaust and when she and her students wear that symbol they are analogizing the experiences of Muslim-Americans in 2015 to the extermination of the Jewish people under Nazi Germany before and during World War II.

Not only is the very notion an insidious lie, and an insult to the Jewish people, but it waters down the meaning of the Holocaust to the expense of all of us.

The University of San Diego should be ashamed of itself and the Jewish student body should be, if not outraged, at least highly curious about what Professor Davary is up to, exactly.