Iran is not WWII Germany

With yesterday's remembrance of the 150th anniversary of the death of the greatest U.S. president Abraham Lincoln and the second anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing, perhaps you overlooked today's 'Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day' for the six million European Jews exterminated by Nazis in WWII.

Also slaughtered by the Germans were Russian POW's, gays, Gypsies and the physically and mentally handicapped.

The horrific events during WWII were so organized, brutal and banal no discussion of what happened can help but cause tears and head shaking distress that such a thing could possibly have been wrought by a modern educated society like Germany's in the 1930's and '40's, attempting to wipe-out an entire race of people.

Precisely because of that stunning, industrial-scale WWII slaughter, comparisons of the 'Shoah' (the Holocaust) to anything else must be carefully restricted to similar widespread, societal abominations, like slavery.

Pope Francis was also speaking appropriately yesterday when he invoked the phrase 'Genocide' to commemorate and remember the mass deaths of Armenian captives, perhaps a million or more, by the Turkish Army a hundred years ago during WWI.

Have you no shame?

Comparing any other non-genocidal commercial, medical or political event or action with the Nazi Holocaust is contemptuous because it cheapens that gut-wrenching stain on the human experience and dilutes its hallowed status. 

Worse, the misuse for short-term political gain is sometimes done by people who should know better.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who should certainly know better, yesterday compared the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews by Germany to Iran and it's contested nuclear program. Using the sacred background of Israel's Yad Vashem, he urged the world to stop Iran before the mullahs use their secret nukes to exterminate Israel and perpetrate a second Holocaust. 

Bibi bite your tongue. 

Casting Iran in the role of modern-day Nazi Germany? Are you accusing the U.S. government of blindly facilitating a Holocaust of Jews in Israel because we are in favor of a negotiated settlement of the current nuclear standoff? Really? America, France, Britain, China and Russia all conspiring to facilitate a second Holocaust? Really? Bibi, have you no shame?