No, the tweeting Syrian girl is not the new Anne Frank
No, the tweeting Syrian girl is not the new Anne Frank

“Does it sound familiar?”, asked the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof when he compared Anne Frank to Syrian migrants.

How is it possible to compare the Jews in the ‘40s, ghettoized, dispossessed of their property, marked with the yellow star and gassed with Zyklon B in the Nazi concentration camps, to the current victims of wars in the Middle East, like the children of Aleppo?

Jeff McMahan, a professor at Oxford, also established this comparison: “Syria is a modern-day Holocaust”. “Treatment of Migrants Evokes Memories of Europe’s Darkest Hour,” declared another headline in The New York Times.

Two House Democrats, one the ranking member on the immigration subcommittee, issued this statement on the Syrian refugee crisis: “Just over 75 years ago, a ship called the St. Louis, carrying nearly a thousand Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, sailed so close to the United States that passengers could see the city lights of Miami. But rather than welcome these refugees, the United States turned them away. Many later died in concentration camps. We should not repeat the mistake of rejecting those fleeing for their lives”.

Now the Washington Post calls Bana Alabed, the tweeting Syrian girl from Aleppo, “our Anne Frank”.

This is a shameful comparison for historical and moral reasons.

No Jew who fled the Nazi comparison tried to slaughter hundreds of Western civilians. No Jew who escaped the Nazi trains ever tried to impose a kosher menu in Western schools.
No Jew who fled the Nazi comparison tried to slaughter hundreds of Western civilians. No Jew who escaped the Nazi trains ever tried to impose a kosher menu in Western schools.

The Syrians have supporters in the high levels of the Western governments, the European Union, the UN and the Sunni Arab countries. The Jews were completely alone. The British Foreign Office and the US Department of State took the decision that it was better to leave the Jews dying in the gas chambers rather than bomb the rail lines leading to Birkenau. There were not even refugee camps for the Jews until 1944. The Syrian refugees have instead been welcomed by Europe, the US, Canada and the UN refugee camps in neighboring countries. Germany has taken a million of them.

So the comparison between the Jews in 1939 and the Syrian refugees in 2016, between a little girl from Aleppo and a Jewish girl from Amsterdam, is an absurd and ideological exercise. As well as an insult to all the Anne Franks incinerated by the Nazis.