The Health Care Debate and the Usage of Nazi Imagery and Propaganda

About twelve days ago, I received a call from the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. The RAC had been contacted by the White House about President Obama’s upcoming trip to Raleigh to speak about heath care, and they requested a few rabbis attend. They had three tickets and wanted to know if I was interested.

I, of course, said yes and had the incredible chutzpah to ask if they could get another ticket for me. Two hours later, I received an email from the White House itself to inform me there would be an extra ticket which I promptly gave to our Associate Rabbi, Rabbi Andy Koren!

Sometimes, it just does not hurt to have the audacity to ask!

We enjoyed our time there. The discussion was thoughtful.

However, on the way out, we passed a demonstrator who was holding a sign which said, “ObamaCare = National Socialism”. The other rabbis stood by in amazement as I confronted the person holding this sign. I told them that, as a rabbi and as a Jew, I found this sign to be particularly offensive.

If you are not aware, National Socialism is a code word for Nazism and the holder of the sign understood this very well. The word “Nazi” is actually an acronym for the words “National Socialist Workers Party.”

I mentioned to the demonstrator that I accepted his right to disagree with the President and to express such disagreement. However, comparing Obama’s health care plan to the rule of the Nazi party in Germany was terribly hurtful to Jews who had lost one third of their population, six million souls - of whom one and a half million were children – to the Nazi death machine. As a matter of fact, as far as Jews are concerned, the Nazi party is about as far away from healthcare as one could get. Using this imagery seemed to me to be quite hurtful.

But more is involved here.

When I lived in Israel, I had to opportunity to meet on several occasions with a woman named Ruth Eliaz. Ruth was a survivor of Auschwitz. Ruth’s story is extraordinary.

Ruth was pregnant in Auschwitz. Most of the time pregnant woman and women with young children were sent directly to the gas chambers as soon as the cattle car transports arrived. Ruth was chosen in the selection to be a worker. As her pregnancy continued, she tried her best to cover her stomach knowing full well that if she were to be discovered, she would be sent directly to the gas chamber. Eventually the pregnancy could not be hidden any longer. Ruth was taken to the infamous Nazi doctor, Doctor Josef Mengele.

In Auschwitz, Mengele conducted horrific experiments on Jews, especially on Jewish twins. Mengele told Ruth that he had something special in mind for her and that he would allow her to continue the pregnancy to term. After Ruth gave birth to a baby boy, she began to breast feed the child. Mengele had her brought to him whereupon he strapped her to a gurney and injected her breasts with poison so that she would not be able to feed her baby. The purpose of this “experiment” in his mind was to see how long a new born baby could live without being fed. Of course, in the women’s section of Auschwitz, there were no other women who could breast feed Ruth’s baby. Eventually, after several days of seeing her child suffer, Ruth could stand it no longer and she smothered her own child.

This terrible story actually has somewhat of a decent ending in that Ruth did survive Auschwitz and after the War made it to Israel where she married, and they had two children of their own. Both of the children served in the Israeli army, one of them was a pilot in the Israeli Air force.

After the war, the infamous Dr. Mengele escaped to South America and was never brought to trial as a war criminal.

I tell this story to your tonight because we need to truly understand what “health care” meant for Jews who had the misfortune of living under the rule of National Socialism.

Two days ago, Rush Limbaugh compared grassroots supporters of President Obama as "the real brownshirts" and on his website an Obama healthcare logo is put side-by-side with a Nazi symbol.Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) wrote the following in response to Limbaugh:

“As a Democrat who founded the Institute On The Holocaust and The Law, I have a lesson for Rush Limbaugh. Today, there are survivors of the Holocaust with tattoos stenciled on their arms who are registered Democrats. And he's treated them with vile contempt. Limbaugh has the right to be the buffoon that he is. He has no right to compare Americans to Nazis who exterminated 6 million Jews. I know he won't apologize. I do expect my Republican colleagues to denounce his comments. The Holocaust taught us that silence in the face of evil expression becomes acquiescence to evil. And what Limbaugh said is pure evil.”

Again, while it is perfectly legitimate to agree or disagree with the proposals on the table, comparing a proposal to Nazi policies is really beyond the bounds of proper political discourse.

In 1996, I met Leah Rabin, the wife of Prime Minister Rabin who a year earlier had been assassinated by a lone Jewish gunman. Prior to his assassination, Rabin’s opponents had held demonstrations wherein signs were held up of his face pasted on a picture of a Nazi SS uniform. Ms. Rabin blamed her political opponents for not forcefully condemning such hysterical propaganda and she felt that this propaganda had created the atmosphere necessary for the crazed assassin to be cultivated.

This demonization of political opponents is currently taking place in our country, and it is a disturbing phenomenon. By the way, in the 1930 and 1932 elections, Nazi Brown Shirts would often go to the rallies and meetings of their political opponents with the expressed purpose of making enough noise to totally disrupt the meeting.

Folks, we as Americans are dealing with fire here. I have heard a rumor that the Secret Service was processing three times the amount of threats against President Obama when compared to recent presidents. If true, some of this may be accounted to the positions for which he advocates, but some of it could also be attributed to overt racism. Regardless, the demonization of the president and his positions by the extreme right is, in my opinion, a contributing factor to threats against his personal safety.

You might remember that last summer, then candidate Obama went to Israel and placed a prayer in the Western Wall, the holiest site in all of Judaism. When asked what the contents of the prayer were, he answered that he asked God to protect him and his family. In the current atmosphere, this prayer has even greater meaning, and it should not only be his prayer but ours as well!

The health care debate in our country is at a critical crossroad. A lot is at stake for our future, but the way in which we need to find a solution to this problem needs to be civil and respectful.

I would like to suggest a few additional assumptions upon which the current discussion needs to be based. These are:

1. Scare tactics based upon false information have no place in this discussion. The Nazi’s called this the “Big Lie” technique. What this meant is that if one continued to tell the same lie over and over, no matter how outrageous it was, the gullible public would eventually begin to believe it. In this case, the extreme right accuses proposed policies of giving the government power to kill the elderly by requiring living will documents. However, encouraging doctors to speak with their patients about a living will makes good sense. It is the ethical thing to do and, economically, it is a prudent thing to do if it prevents people who do not wish to be kept alive in vegetative states from being sustained for months or even years connected to sophisticated and expensive machines. It is a gross statement to say that this policy will lead to the government deciding to kill elderly people. This is not a "slippery slope" argument, but an example of grotesque propaganda in the tradition of the “Big Lie” Technique.

2. Our current system of health care is not as good as we think it is. According to the World Health Organization, while the United States spends more money on health care than any other nation, our overall rank is thirty-seventh in terms of the quality of healthcare for the entire population. People in other countries do live longer than we do and our ranking in infant mortality is thirty seventh.

3. Doing nothing is not an option. Currently 18% of the GNP is siphoned toward health care – the highest rate in the developed world. By doing nothing to curb this growth, figures may climb 30% or more. Health care premiums and deductibles will continue to rise and fewer small businesses will be able provide health care as a benefit to their employees.

4. Finally, the figures for the cost of health care from the Congressional Budget Office need to be taken seriously. Current plans in the House which could add a trillion to the deficit are not acceptable. Cost-cutting measures are a critical component of any heath care reform or expansion of coverage. By the way, the president himself has stated that he will not sign a health care bill which is not revenue neutral.

Almost one thousand years ago, the great Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides, listed health care as the number one item on his list of services which a community must provide for its people. Emphasis on the community and its needs, as opposed emphasis fulfillment of self gratification and greed, is a fundamental Jewish value.

We are living during a very difficult time as far as health care costs are concerned. It is important for us as a nation to find a solution to this problem if we want our nation not only to have better health care, but to be economically competitive in the coming decades. Finding this solution will necessitate not only a lot of creative thinking, but will also require a lot of civility and respectful debate. Perhaps most important, it will require a lot of prayer, for we will need God’s help as a nation to take us from where health care is today to the place where it ought to be, a place wherein all of us, as holy manifestations of the Divine, will have access to high quality and affordable health care.