Using Jews as a prop for a political screed: the Ken Burns Holocaust show.

Ken Burns Holocaust PBS Doc Ends With Calling Republicans Nazis

September 20, 2022 by Daniel Greenfield

As was inevitable.

I’ll have an article on Ken Burns exploiting the Holocaust to call for open borders and bash Republicans while covering up FDR’s role in the Holocaust later this week, but the sheer awfulness of it can be summed up in this paragraph from the equally antisemitic Guardian which never stops calling for the destruction of the Jewish State or justifying the murder of Jews.

It may be Burns’s most didactic film yet as it ends provocatively with images of Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African American congregants at a church in South Carolina; white supremacists marching with flaming torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!”; the killing of 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on 6 January 2021.

“Provocatively” in this case means shamelessly exploiting the Holocaust for a leftist agenda.

Only two, at best three, if you count Camp Auschwitz guy and Hitler guy, have anything to do with Jews and the Holocaust. But, most notably, they pretend that antisemitism is a phenomenon that wholly exists on one side, just shortly after the New York Times pushed the false claim that Jewish critics of Linda Sarsour’s antisemitism were Russian trolls.

“We were obligated to do that because the way we mount this series is we begin with antisemitism in America and racism and the pernicious slave trade and xenophobia and nativism and eugenics,” he explains. “We’re obligated then to not close our eyes and pretend this is some comfortable thing in the past that doesn’t rhyme with the present.”

The slave trade?

“But I am also talking about Britain. I am also talking about the rise of the right in France. I’m talking about Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil and a tendency.”

Curiously, not about Iran, Hamas or any of the Jihadists who actually want to perpetrate another Holocaust.

The slave trade is part of the conversation, but Hitler’s Mufti and a regime whose motto is “Death to America, Death to Israel” isn’t.

“Roosevelt had to combat an isolationist America First committee. We meet characters like Breckinridge Long, this implacable antisemite and assistant secretary of state in the Roosevelt administration’s state department who does everything he can to obscure or bury news about the coming Holocaust and make it increasingly more difficult for refugees who are fulfilling the requirements.

“He’s always changing the requirements, raising the bar, moving the goalposts. He reminds me a little bit of Stephen Miller [a senior adviser to Trump] in the previous administration.”

Burns is deep in whitewashing FDR here who was violently antisemitic. The State Department was doing his bidding by keeping Jews from coming to America.

And then Burns tops it all by bringing in Stephen Miller, who’s Jewish.

The Republicans are the Nazis and Jewish conservatives are their enablers, in Burns’ world, and illegal aliens and BLM are the new Jews.

This is classic supersessionism and typical of the Left which appropriates Jewish history, dejudaizes it and then uses it to attack Jews.

Daniel Greenfield