a controversial and possibly alienating blog post.

You know, I try - I try - to stay out of politics now....I learned my lesson last year. But you know what, I can't do this anymore. Obama compared the "plight" of the Palestinians to that of the Holocaust. News flash: There are about six million differences why that's not true. He visits Buchenwald tomorrow, and hopefully things can be clarified for him. Though I'm not a fan of President Bush, I did like his Middle East policies. He said that the US would only engage Palestinian leaders not compromised by terror. Obama doesn't seem to agree with this. He seems to equate the moral standards of the Palestinians to those of Israelis. I'm sorry, but when was the last time you heard of an Israeli terrorist suicide bomber in the Palestinian territories? We (yes, I'm using we, I'm aware) don't strap dozens of nails to us and walk into a pizza place and blow ourselves up. We don't walk into a University cafeteria and set off a bomb that's on our vest. Rather than encouraging less settlements by Israelis, he should be encouraging the Arab world to denounce Hamas and terrorism. Maybe he should actually cross Egypt's borders and visit Israel and witness the clean-up of a suicide bomber attack. He'll see members of the Orthodox group ZAKA meticulously collecting body parts to ensure a proper Jewish burial for those killed. They also collect the body parts of non-Jews, so that their families can have a complete burial.  

Marc Thiessen, who is a former Bush speechwriter, even said this is a huge shift in US policy regarding Israel. And you know, Saturday marks 3 years since my first trip to Israel, and I'd return in a heartbeat. Yes, there is genocide all over the world, but nothing merits comparison to the Holocaust. People were shoved into gas chambers and killed, and their loved ones put their bodies in the incinerators. Those in concentration camps, when they were "lucky", used soap - but that soap was made from those who were killed. And the world watched. Since March 1933, the death camps were operating (Dachau opened then). The camp Theresienstadt, or Terezin, killed 15,000 children. And as late as 1944, the Red Cross visited the camp to see if it really was a "death camp", and the Nazis were able to fool them. And the world just watched, and read about it in the back pages of the papers. 

Where is all of this coming from?

As a Jewish woman who has had considerable religious education, I cannot adequately describe the feeling of walking through Yad V'Shem, or the DC Holocaust Museum, and having the thought, "This could have been me."  I cannot put words to looking at heaps and heaps of human hair, and glasses, and shoes, and wondering how many belonged to relatives of mine. The fact that half my family is Roman Catholic wouldn't have saved me back then. In fact, they'd probably be taken to the camps with me. I can't tell you the revulsion I felt at learning about Joseph Mengele, and imagining what my best friends' Bubbe went through at his hands when she was at Auschwitz. I grew up with the names Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, among dozens of others. My kindergarten teacher showed us the numbers on her arm one day during naptime. On Yom Hashoa, we all wore golden yellow stars with "Jude" written on it, in rememberence. You don't forget these experiences, these lessons, even years and years later.  

I just had to get this off my chest.