Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated internationally on January 27, to mark the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
What I have learned over the past two years, however, is that the international community has no clue what the true gravity of the Holocaust was, nor do they care unless they can use it for their own political agenda.
I'm not an American, so I feel irresponsible commenting on domestic issues in a country of which I am not a citizen. I can appreciate, however, the emotions running high over these ICE raids, and the deaths that followed in the clashes are truly devastating. Yet to hear Minnesota governor Tim Walz, someone who ran for vice president no less, compare the incident to Anne Frank is simply unacceptable. He attempted to draw parallels between Anne Frank hiding from Nazi forces and immigrants hiding in their homes from ICE officers.
Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed by Department of Homeland Security officers, no matter the exact circumstances leading to his death, is a real tragedy on its own. There is no reason to exploit the Holocaust or latch onto Jewish trauma when discussing these issues. Internal discord in the United States over how to handle illegal immigration is not the same thing as "The Final Solution," the Nazi regime's plan to systematically murder all Jews in Europe during World War II.
It is not even remotely the same thing.
These Holocaust inversions, and even Holocaust envy, are exhausting and infuriating. No matter your personal opinion on migration or how to handle illegal migrants, if you make comparisons to the Holocaust, all it tells us is that you have zero understanding of what the Holocaust was.
As a centrist, my political views sit in the middle, and many in my camp feel isolated and politically homeless. What people on the left fail to grasp is that they could find an ally in people like myself, yet they make it impossible when they make such ridiculous comparisons.
After Alex Pretti's shooting, Representative Ilhan Omar published a quote by Elie Wiesel on her X, saying, "Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented," and American author Stephen King published that "ICE is the American Gestapo."
The fact that we have reached a point where Jewish trauma, and an act so unbelievable against Jews, an act that coined the term genocide because there was no other way to describe it, is now used as a universal metaphor, shows that Holocaust education has completely failed.
Especially during the war in Gaza, there was a targeted propaganda campaign to construct Holocaust inversions and accuse Israel of doing what the Nazis did to the Jews. Even today, Hamas puppets continue pushing the notion that there is a genocide in Gaza, or that the population transfers of Gazans are comparable to "concentration camps." Some go as far as to take the October 7 massacre, in which Hamas planned for years, invaded Israel, mass slaughtered civilians, and took hostages, and compare it to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
I have seen the letter former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar wrote, in his own handwriting, while planning the massacre. He specifically instructed his operatives to film scenes of horror and to create terrifying images of burning Kibbutzim. He wanted to paralyze the entire Israeli population. For people to compare that to Jewish prisoners who had to choose between fighting the Nazis or being shipped off to extermination camps is a new low.
Every time an American politician makes such comparisons, they are not just misusing history; they are actively erasing the horror endured by millions and dishonoring the memory of the dead.
There was a moment during my first trip to Poland that will haunt me forever. I am lucky that none of my family had been in concentration or extermination camps, so I was more emotionally detached from the museums and graveyards my group visited. But when we went inside a cattle car, railway freight cars originally meant for transporting livestock, horrifically repurposed by the Nazis to transport Jews and other victims, the gravity of it hit me. I could just imagine being a young Jewish girl, crammed inside with 100 other prisoners, with no seats, no food, no ventilation, and felt as if I were being transported to my death.
Six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. It was an intent to destroy an entire population, and it is something I only truly understood after October 7, when I watched Hamas livestream their massacre of Jews with utter joy and elation. The commitment to destroy an entire race, "from the river to the sea," is something the Nazis would have been proud of.
No matter how you feel about these ICE raids, no matter your stance on immigration, you can make your point without downplaying the Holocaust. When you normalize Holocaust language to describe situations that are painful or unjust but not genocidal, you erase the unique horror that six million Jews endured and dishonor the memory of those who perished. Words matter, and invoking the Holocaust inaccurately does not strengthen your argument; it only diminishes history and turns real suffering into a political tool.
