Anti-Choice Group Pushes To Screen Movie Comparing Abortion To The Holocaust In High Schools

By Marie Diamond/Think Progress

As ThinkProgress has reported, anti-abortion activists are increasingly taking their crusade to high schools and middle schools, frightening students with disturbing graphic images as they make their way to class.

Now, the creators of a movie that compares abortion to the Holocaust are taking this tactic a step further and arelobbying to screen their film in high schools. The group’spress release touts the film’s ability to change minds, and makes no distinction between the actual Holocaust and modern abortion. In fact, the creator promotes the film as the solution to a lack of education about the Holocaust in American schools:

A free DVD of the award-winning viral movie “180″ may be coming to a high school near you. The creator of www.180movie.com, Ray Comfort, said “180 received over a million views in 22 days, because it’s ‘shocking.’ [...]

Late last month, between 180,000 and 200,000 copies of the 33-minute DVD were given out at 100 of America’s top universities, and now the Jewish author and TV co-host is turning his attention to high schools. “No doubt some will say that Holocaust education isn’t appropriate for high school kids. However, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that the appropriate age is ’11 years of age and older.’ [...]

Comfort added, “It’s evident that many of the States aren’t bothering to teach kids about one of the darkest periods of human history. I am concerned that we may become like the U.K. where some schools dropped teaching about the Holocaust for fear of offending Moslems, some of whom deny that the Holocaust even happened…This is more than a travesty, so we are giving hundreds of thousands of kids a free documentary.

The movie has gone viral in the anti-abortion community, with its website registering nearly 1.5 million views so far. Comfort’s mission is to essentially replace teaching about the horrors of the Holocaust of the 1940s with propaganda about abortion. He also misleadingly suggests that the Holocaust Museum endorses his video as a proper educational tool about the wholesale slaughter of Jews, gays, and other minorities that is appropriate for young children.

It’s disturbing to think that thousands of students’ first exposure to a world-changing historical atrocity would be colored by such an inaccurate and insulting argument. To equate women’s personal choices about their reproductive health to the Nazis’ systematic, coordinated operation to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population is to reduce its unique importance and confuse students.

Beck Uses Holocaust Images, Distortions, Self-Aggrandizement To Promote His Israel Rally

 by Karen Famighetti/Media Matters

A new video has appeared on Glenn Beck's website, titled "FREE GBTV Video Essay: Are the hatreds of the past returning?" The message of the video seems to be that the Jewish people are in danger of facing another Holocaust and no one is willing to stand up to it but Beck. This is in service of advertising Beck's upcoming "Restoring Courage" rally in Israel.

The video features Beck speaking on his radio show about the upcoming destruction of Israel and the Jewish people overlaid with images of people in Muslim garb calling for the destruction of Jews, and disturbing images of Nazis and concentration camp survivors. Beck warns of hatred of Jews returning and going hand in hand with hatred of capitalism and stereotypes about Jewish bankers, and says that a Nazi party is now forming in Egypt.

Beck then asks his audience if they would defend him if he were Jewish and being persecuted by a Nazi neighbor. This is overlaid with more Holocaust imagery and people waving pictures of Osama bin Laden and signs in Arabic.

This is followed by Beck asking, "Would you, as my friend, say 'I can't help you. You've got to give that land back first, and then I'll help you'?" This is overlaid with an image of President Obama and a map of Israel. But contrary to Beck's false implication that Obama has told Israel to give up land to the Palestinians before the United States will offer it help. Obama's reference to Israel's 1967 borders in his call for a "viable Palestine" and a "secure Israel" is in line with past U.S. policy on Israel, including remarks made by President George W. Bush. Obama has promised that the U.S. will be "unwavering" in its support for Israel, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Obama for his "steadfast commitment to Israel's security" and agreed that Israel's borders will have to change.

Beck then says that "we did promise we would never let it happen again" and that "they'll have to come through me," while showing images of U.S. troops storming a beach -- seemingly likening himself to the Allied invasion at Normandy -- and claiming that he would be willing to die for a righteous cause.

The video concludes with an advertisement for Beck's Restoring Courage rally and his new Internet venture, GBTV.

Holocaust survivors condemn Glenn Beck’s ‘monstrous’ report on Soros

By Daniel Tencer

Rosenberg: 'Glenn Beck era will likely end sooner than expected'

Holocaust survivors and prominent Jewish groups are targeting Fox News personality Glenn Beck for his claim that billionaire George Soros helped in the effort to exterminate Jews during World War II.

Some political observers are wondering whether Beck may have gone too far this week with a series on Soros, the billionaire financier and philanthropist of Jewish extraction who survived the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary. During a multi-part series on Soros on his radio show, Beck on Thursday described Soros' youth during the war:

George Soros' father asked a Christian in Hungary to adopt his son or make him his Godson. And George Soros used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property. And then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. ... It's frightening. Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps.

That comment drew condemnation from Holocaust survivors and Jewish groups, who described it as offensive and ignorant.

"For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say – inaccurately – that there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, as part of a broader assault on Mr. Soros, that's horrific," said Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor. "To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant."

According to previously published accounts of his life, Soros was tasked as a child with delivering eviction notices to Jewish families during the war. But there does not appear to be any evidence that Soros "helped send the Jews to the death camps," as Beck asserted.

In an interview with the Jewish Week, Foxman said it was wrong to hold individuals to account for what they did to survive the war.

“Look, I spit on Jews when I was six years old,” Foxman said. “Does that make me an anti-Semite?”

(Like Soros, Foxman was handed over to, and raised by, a Christian family during the war.)

Elan Steinberg, vice-president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, told the Jewish Week that Beck's comments were "monstrous."

Beck's comments "go to the heart of the instrumentalization and trivialization of the Holocaust," Steinberg said.

Beck has long named George Soros as one of the people he views as an enemy of America, because of Soros' links to progressive causes. During the mid-term elections, Beck built a narrative of Soros as a shadowy puppetmaster attempting to destroy the US economy and middle class.

Now, at least one political writer sees career jeopardy in Beck's latest attacks on Soros.

"Thanks to the ADL, the Glenn Beck era will likely end sooner than expected," writes M.J. Rosenberg, a TalkingPointsMemo writer who focuses on Jewish and Israeli issues.

Rosenberg posits that Beck's series on Soros "would have been illegal in Germany" where "it is illegal to use Nazi images and themes especially to malign a Jew, let alone a Holocaust survivor."

He adds that he felt Beck's series was "so anti-Semitic" that it convinced him a Holocaust could happen in the United States.

"I am not saying Beck is anti-Semitic," he explained. "I think he is so utterly ignorant of Jewish history and the history of Germany 1933-1945 that he is unaware of what he is doing."

The following audio was broadcast on The Glenn Beck Program, Nov. 10, 2010, and was uploaded to the Web by MediaMatters.

Glenn Beck Compares Fox News To Jews During Holocaust (AUDIO)

by Gazelle Emami

Leave it to Glenn Beck to take things too far. On his radio show Tuesday Beck drew a rather over-the-top analogy between, of all things, Fox News and Jewish persecution during the Holocaust. The basis for this comparison was the White House's recent criticism of Fox News' reporting, in which it called the network "the communications arm of the Republican Party" and said that its reporting style is more opinion than straight news. Beck suggested that the campaign against Fox was only the beginning of a full on assault by the Obama administration against the press.

When they're done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something. The old, "first they came for the Jews, and I wasn't Jewish." When you have a question, and you believe that something should be asked, they're a -- totally fine with you right now; they have no problem with you.

Beck then made a plea to other news organizations to not stand by and let this media genocide happen.

Casual comparisons to the Holocaust are probably never a good idea, but Beck hasn't been afraid to go there in the past -- i.e. Beck's claim that Al Gore was creating another "Hitler Youth".

LISTEN to a segment of Beck's rant from Media Matters for America.:

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/13/glenn-beck-compares-fox-n_n_318784.html