In WWII, the Nazis herded innocent people, mostly Jews, including men, women, and little children, into concentration camps.
The term concentration camp means a place where people are concentrated. Separated. Imprisoned. Temporarily or otherwise. For the purpose of transit or otherwise.
What the Nazis did was put Jews in forced labor camps, where they were worked to death, or death camps, which were primarily for the purpose of mass murdering the inmates.
After WWII, people, again, mostly Jews, who had been rendered homeless by the Nazis and by the Polish antisemites, were put into transit camps. Displaced People camps. Newsflash: Those were concentration camps. Displaced People, people in transit on their way to another place, were concentrated in these camps.
But after the horror of the death camps, and the adoption of the Nazi euphemism “concentration camps” for those murderpits, no one wanted to call the DP camps by that name.
In the United States, Japanese Americans were put into “internment camps”. Those were also concentration camps, though their intent was very different from the Nazi ones.
And another newsflash for you: prisons are concentration camps, too. And most of them include forced labor. Though at least in the US, the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment keeps them from working the inmates to death.
The American 13th Amendment to the Constitution says:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Prisons are permitted to engage in forced labor. Who knew?
So why am I talking about this? Because there are times when concentration camps are 100% legitimate.
This image, including the rectangles, was posted by an anti-Israel propagandist on Twitter. Her post was then shared by a foolish Jew named Andrew Feinstein, along with this pearl of non-wisdom:
It pains me to say this & I don’t do so lightly, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, as someone who has lectured on genocide prevention at Auschwitz, where my mom lost dozens of her family, but Israel is behaving like Nazis. This is not self-defence, this is not to protect Jews, this is Nazism, this is a Holocaust driven by racist white supremacy
He’s an idiot. And a vicious, self-hating antisemite. He’s been pounding the genocide drum since long before this. It’s just more fodder for him.
But I want to go on the record here. You can share this post and claim that I’m in favor of doing to others what was done to us during the Holocaust because I’ve titled it “Concentration Camps are Fine.” Go right ahead. Anyone stupid enough to read a headline without the content is worthless anyway.
Let me go further, though. Had the Jews of Germany been dedicated for long decades to the erasure of Germany and its replacement with a Jewish country in its place, had the Jews of Germany been running around baking babies in ovens, raping teenagers to death, burning whole families alive, and taken pictures which they shared publicly and proudly with the world, I think it would have been absolutely justified for the Germans to round us up and put us into camps pending expulsion.
What the Germans did to us, putting us in concentration camps, was not wrong because there’s something evil about concentration camps. It’s wrong because:
We were innocent. We’d done nothing.
Said concentration camps were forced labor camps where we were worked to death.
Many of those concentration camps were death camps, where the mass murder of Jews, day in and day out, was the primary purpose. Thousands upon thousands of us.
That is why putting us in those camps was evil. Not because there’s something wrong with concentration camps, as such.
When I saw the what I thought was a clickbait title I flinched, but your post absolutely earned it. So true. But TBH, the association of the term still hurts.
Putting refugees into camps ( call them whatever you want) until they can be transferred. to lands that will accept no them, is the only logical solution. They will never agree to live peacefully under a Jewish government. Grievance and victimhood will never result in peaceful coexistence and those are the only cards in their deck. If they want to accuse Jews of putting Arabs in concentration camps, if it gives Israel peace, who cares.