Addedum to Last Post

A serious one. At some point during Copolla's diatribe, he asked rhetorically, how can there be peace with Palestinian children living in concentration camps?

I almost blurted out laughing. I should note, this is the second time in the past two years, I've heard the term concentration camp misused. The other was in a Japanese American exhibit on the internment in Japan town in which a lecturer kept refering to the Japanese internment camps as concentration camps.

If I had any balls, I would have stood up and corrected Mr. Copolla, as I had done at the prior lecture.

Concentration Camp has a specific meaning, a meaning derived from the holocaust, a meaning that implies state sanctioned genocide on a mass scale, with the specific example of Jews in Nazi Germany.

Palestinian children live in refugee camps, not concentration camps. Japanese americans lived in internment camps, not concentration camps.

I wish I could assume the misuse of this word was on accident, but I know the misuse is completely on purpose, it is meant to equate the suffering of the Palestinians and/or the Japanese Americans with the suffering of the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany. If we want to play that noxious game of comparing suffering, which we shouldn't be tempted to in the first place, neither group has the right to claim equal suffering to the Jews during the holocaust. It is an outrage, and those of us on the left should be offended and angry by anyone who brutalizes words in the way Orwell warned us about.

No wonder he didn't become a writer.