07.26.2011 07:50 AM

Hudak PC campaign manager: gays, lesbians not “real victims” of Holocaust

Gays, lesbians and others who perished in the Holocaust were not “real victims,” quote unquote.

Eleven days ago, this same far-rightist tilted at me and others on Twitter for pointing out that Tim Hudak has pledged, in writing and on the floor of the Legislature, to defund abortion. When he was asked his role within the PC campaign, he went silent.

Blum is the campaign manager for the Hudak PCs in Toronto Centre.  He has a senior, formal role in the Hudak machine. Does Hudak agree with Blum that gays, lesbians and others were not “real victims” of the Holocaust?

37 Comments

  1. Joseph P Stern says:

    Warren, I read Glen Murray and Bernie Farber’s article on Jews and gays. It was elegantly written and I would hardly have believed it could in any way have been provocative. Guess I was wrong. It seems that some orthodox rabbis have taken issue with Farber and Murray. In a letter to the Toronto Star these Rabbis believe that homosexuals should not be remembered as targets of Nazi murder because unlike Jews they claim gays and lesbians are a “political ideology” like “communism” they say. This seems to have led Blum to jump on the same bandwagon.

    As a traditional Jew myself I understand the prohibition against homosexuality. It is a tenant I find hard to come to grips with in the 21st century. In fact even amongst our own orthodox community there are gays and lesbians afraid to come out and you can understand why given the position taken by some orthodox Rabbis.

    Suggesting that homosexuals were not victimized by the Nazis is just wrong. More than that it’s sad because it gives an impression that many Jews feel this way. We don’t. And yes as Farber and Murray have written we have still a far way to go.

  2. que sera sera says:

    How dead do you have to be to be a “real victim”?

  3. frmr disgruntled Con, now Happy Lib says:

    I wonder how he feels about Romani(Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, Polish and Russian civilians, Russian Prisoners of War, and people with disabilities who also perished in the death camps…were these not “real victims of the Holocaust” as well?

    I hope the Queer electorate of Ontario rise up in righteous indignation, and redouble their efforts to ensure Mr. Hudak and his ilk never form a govt…….

    • RN200 says:

      I hope they are very load and public about their indignation, because that will help Tim win.
      (see: Rob Ford)

    • RN200 says:

      I hope they are very loud and public about their indignation, because that will help Tim win.
      (see: Rob Ford)

      • McGuinty Conservative says:

        You are correct. When liberals try to manufacture scandals like this, it reeks of desperation.

        But why are you hoping for a Hudak victory?

        I think that a Hudak (I’m sure he’s a nice guy and all) victory would be disastrous for the long-term prospects of conservatism in this country.

        Which is why I am voting for McGuilty.

    • McGuinty Conservative says:

      As much as I’d like this scandal to ensure McGuilty’s re-election, I doubt it will have that much effect.

      While we may support McGuilty for different reasons, we should not appear desperate to latch on to every scandal that comes out. After a while, it just becomes a lot of white noise and people ignore the riff-raff.

      Kind of like the pot bust scandal that was supposed to bring down Rob Ford — when it came out, it actually drove up his polling numbers.

  4. Wes says:

    Since I took the time to follow the links, I thought I’d post the actual tweets.

    1. Rabbi’s lttr in TorStar: the Crux of the Rabbi’s mssg was that ones humanity supersedes one’s life choices Rabbi Schochet is a Tzaddik !!!
    2. Shame on liberals for politicizing the Holocaust to serve their own ends and dlbrtly taking out of cntext words to drspct the real victims

  5. McGuinty Conservative says:

    “The easiest way to destroy a cause is by becoming it’s most excessive advocate” — Nietzsche.

    Easy, Warren. By cheering for McGuinty too much and focusing on every foo-foo Hudak scandal, you will drive up the anti-McGuinty froth and ensure that Dalton doesn’t win re-election.

    How can I be a Conservative and be a McGuinty supporter? I have my own reasons, but it’s certainly not because I love McGuinty or that I’m a disaffected Conservative.

    So if you really want to help McGuinty, lay back a bit on the Hudak attacks, OK? Such vitriol will only serve to give him sympathy.

    In this day and age of instant information and the internet, it’s pretty easy to make guilt-by-association attacks for everything that anybody has said. Fox News and MSNBC play that game constantly as they cheerlead their respective parties that they shill for and cry indignation for every one of their opponents’ missteps. After a while, it becomes “the boy who cried wolf” and people stop caring.

    • Warren says:

      I’m not a government agency, old chum. I’m just me, expressing my honest opinion.

      You guys all know I liked John Tory very much, and had a very different approach during the 2007 election lead-up.

      This guy, I despise. He let his minions dig deep into my personal life, and I will never forgive or forget it.

      That, and he’s a liar.

  6. Matt says:

    I couldn’t be more offended. My great uncle was a labour organizer when the Nazi’s came to power. He was taken away and never heard from again. I would love to be more expressive, however words fail me. What a truly scary group.

  7. ok says:

    Right wing always are same in Canada or US and they think \
    cut more to balance sheet date
    as BALANCE SHEET is not easy formual and need consider more

    =====

    Obama said: Left wing

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-15eQe2tx4

    Boehner said: right wings
    http://www.cnn.com/video/

    @2:42 minutes of his speech he said:

    he is business man and he know balance sheet

    http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&source=hp&q=balance+sheet+equation&oq=balance+sheet+&aq=6&aqi=g10&aql=1&gs_sm=c&gs_upl=500l3703l0l11421l14l14l0l2l2l0l281l2186l0.6.6l12&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=74d631b4ae29f7b3&biw=792&bih=425

    So he knows it must get balance in short or long term

    secondly when he said he is busienss man he miss big point business only work for profit not for any free job with no profit

    government run sometimes NOT only for profit but also to take care of people and in long run creat job that it will pay them what they owe

    Right wings in US and some other English nice talk with HIT US because they defame US and for them to take power

    and as he is business man and like to take more he is not going to give
    with no conflict interst all the way to make money
    because if he give all the way he make money then he must pay more taxes or may pay to Obama to stay longr as his compatitor

    busines people not give and like to be have more richer than other regular people and they make money but they have more risk involve and must be smart to direct it well

    so:
    Obama is not good business man for sure
    but he cover all American interst who are poor or mid class and some like intentionally bankrup US too for power and steal their wealth and other reason
    I feel sorry for US government really!

    pay one bill from one credit card with other credit card

    and all to not allow one wealth gain more easy wealthy than others

    while i do not agree with debet when
    your cost is high need to get debt if you have brain for business but if you care about human right must spend too

    then US and Canada solution to allow
    government and right and left get united in share thing together while
    business not work free to pass to government goverment still need business people but must be carefull that both keep their border here

  8. Wannabeapiper says:

    Changing to subject entirely for the moment I heard that the ral Mayor of the City of Toronto-Doug Ford, doesn’t know who Margaret Atwood is? This has got to be the all time record for a level of stupidity or ignorance of a Canadian Politician.

    And the people of this City gave Ford such a huge majority. Wow!

    And now back to Hudack Jeopardy question-category-Authors- the “Blind Assassin”?

  9. Jim Hayes says:

    Homosexuality a “life’s choice”? Is this what the Rabbi’s believe? Do they actually believe in thei

    r hearts that homosexuals were not targeted for being gay? Thank you Mr. Stern for your rationality. And as for Mr. Hudak and company if this is what they believe about gays and lesbians they ought to have been running in the 15th century not the 21st. What an astounding step backwards it would be to vote for these guys, neanderthals all.

  10. Yitz says:

    Did you actually read the letter from the rabbaim? It was quite beautiful, in fact, a declaration that all people deserve respect out of the basic dignity for their humanity and regardless of their religion, race, sexual orientation or other factors. Rabbi Schochet IS a tzaddik. If you knew anything about him,you’d agree. The Vaad HaRabanam is a group of the most distinguished rabbis in this city. I don’t think insulting them is going to help McGuinty (or Farber, who previously insulted a Hasidic rabbi for objecting to Farber’s support of th gay pride parade) with the Jewish community. It’s quite possible, logical even, to condemn mass murder while not supporting certain lifestyles. The communism comparison was a good one. I condemn communism and I also condemn the mass murder of communists. What’s so difficult about that?

    My grandfather (zaycher tzadik l’vracha) was in 4 different concentration camps. His parents, his first wife and 5 of his 6 siblings were murdered by the Nazis, yemach shemos. I find it very distateful that anyone would try to use what he went through to score political points.

    As a historical footnote, if you actually study the history of Naziism (“Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”) is a great source) you’ll know that the while gays were persecuted under THe Nazi regime, this orginated as part of an internat power struggle for control of the Nazi party between Adolf Hitler and his chief rival, Ernst Rohm, who was openly and drew much of his support from other gays. (The naming of the Nazi party, changed from German Workers Party, even took place in a gay bar). The persecution and murder of gays during that period was despicable but please do not compare it to the attempt to wipe an entire people off the face of the earth and succeeding at killing 6 million of us.

    • frmr disgruntled Con, now Happy Lib says:

      …Hitler used the homosexual Rohm as long as he was useful…..when he needed the support of the legitiimate armed forces, one of their conditions was the elimination of the SA, headed by Rohm…….but to say that the persecution of gays and lesbians in the Third Reich was a result of this power struggle is distorting history, Yitz…..Nazi doctrine was anti-gay from the start…..

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_Nazi_Germany_and_the_Holocaust

      Murder is murder Yitz, whether it be of Jews, Roma, or homosexuals….

  11. Yitz says:

    That is a distortion. The persecution of gays was initially a tactic used by Hitler to consolidate power agains the SA forces, which was largely gay and led by Rohm, who was openly gay. Heirich Himmler was certainly very homophobic and exacerbated the persecution of gays and towards the later years, Naziism became obsessed with eugenics, which condemned gays for not breeding and adding more members to the “master race” but Naziism was certainly NOT homophobic from the start. Indeed, homosexuality was initially elevated as emblematic of the “Spartan warrior” ideal to which the Nazis aspired. Additionally, because of Hitler’s deep hatred of Catholicism, homosexuality was praised as a rebellion against Church teachings and celebraed among the party.

    However, for most of the duration of the Third Reich, gays were tolerated and accepted. The point in the Farber-Murray article of homosexuality being illegal is a silly non-sequitar – it was also illegal in Canada and most other nations in the world.

    Indeed, the “pink triangle” was not specificically a symbol to denote gays who had been sent to teh camps. Rather, it was a symbol to mark men (some gay, most straight) as prime targets to be raped by Nazi concentrations camp guards, a disproportionate number of whom were gay. (I recommend “Exodus” by Leon Uris for detailed descriptions of this phenomenon).

    • frmr disgruntled Con, now Happy Lib says:

      I see even victims of the Holocaust can engage in revisionism…..

      In the 1920s, homosexual people in Germany, particularly in Berlin, enjoyed a higher level of freedom and acceptance than anywhere else in the world.[citation needed] However, upon the rise of Adolf Hitler, gay men and, to a lesser extent, lesbians, were two of the numerous groups targeted by the Nazi Party and were ultimately among Holocaust victims. BEGINNING IN 1933, gay organizations were banned, scholarly books about homosexuality, and sexuality in general, were burned, and homosexuals within the Nazi Party itself were murdered. The Gestapo compiled lists of homosexuals, who were compelled to sexually conform to the “German norm.”

      Between 1933–45, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, of which some 50,000 were officially sentenced.[1] Most of these men served time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of those sentenced were incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps.[1] It is unclear how many of the 5,000 to 15,000 eventually perished in the camps, but leading scholar Ruediger Lautman believes that the death rate of homosexuals in concentration camps may have been as high as 60%. Homosexuals in the camps were treated in an unusually cruel manner by their captors.

      After the war, the treatment of homosexuals in concentration camps went unacknowledged by most countries, and some men were even re-arrested and imprisoned based on evidence found during the Nazi years. It was not until the 1980s that governments began to acknowledge this episode, and not until 2002 that the German government apologized to the gay community.[2] This period still provokes controversy, however. In 2005, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the Holocaust which included the persecution of homosexuals.

      • frmr disgruntled Con, now Happy Lib says:

        And if thats not good enough for you, Yitz, try this…..http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx/

        • frmr disgruntled Con, now Happy Lib says:

          About the Museum
          A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inspires citizens and leaders worldwide to confront hatred, promote human dignity, and prevent genocide. A public-private partnership, federal support guarantees the Museum’s permanence, and its far-reaching educational programs and global impact are made possible by donors nationwide.

          Located among our national monuments to freedom on the National Mall, the Museum provides a powerful lesson in the fragility of freedom, the myth of progress, the need for vigilance in preserving democratic values. With unique power and authenticity, the Museum teaches millions of people each year about the dangers of unchecked hatred and the need to prevent genocide. And we encourage them to act, cultivating a sense of moral responsibility among our citizens so that they will respond to the monumental challenges that confront our world. Today we face an alarming rise in Holocaust denial and antisemitism—even in the very lands where the Holocaust happened—as well as genocide and threats of genocide in other parts of the world. All of this when we are soon approaching a time when Holocaust survivors and other eyewitnesses will no longer be alive.

          The Museum works closely with many key segments of society who will affect the future of our nation. Professionals from the fields of law enforcement, the judiciary and the military, as well as diplomacy, medicine, education and religion study the Holocaust, with emphasis on the role of their particular professions and the implications for their own responsibilities. These programs intensify their sense of commitment to the core values of their fields and their roles in the protection of individuals and society.

          In addition to its leadership training programs, the Museum sponsors on-site and traveling exhibitions, educational outreach, Web site, campus outreach and Holocaust commemorations, including the nation’s annual observance in the U.S. Capitol. Our Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies works to ensure the continued growth and vitality of the field of Holocaust studies. As a living memorial to the Holocaust, we work to prevent genocide in the future through our Academy for Genocide Prevention which trains foreign policy professionals. Working with Holocaust survivors and an array of organizations, the Museum is a leader in galvanizing attention to the crisis in Sudan.

          Since its dedication in 1993, the Museum has welcomed more than 30 million visitors, including more than 9 million school children and 91 heads of state. Today 90 percent of the Museum’s visitors are not Jewish, and our Web site, the world’s leading online authority on the Holocaust, on average receives visits from over 100 different countries daily. With hundreds of thousands of online visitors from countries with majority Muslim populations, translating our Web site into Arabic and Farsi is a top priority; already, portions are available in more than 20 languages. For more information, please visit http://www.ushmm.org.

          United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
          100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW
          Washington, DC 20024-2126
          Main telephone: (202) 488-0400
          TTY: (202) 488-0406

        • frmr disgruntled Con, now Happy Lib says:

          2. THE NEW ORDER, 1933—1939

          The Nazis took power in January 1933 on a platform of law and order, “traditional values,” and an ideology of racial purity that included virulent antisemitism and the persecution of unwanted social groups. Among its first steps to create the “New Order,” the regime shut down homosexual gathering places, organizations, and publications in a broad attack on “public indecency.” The Nazi assault on homosexuality had begun.
          From the Holocaust museum website…..

          As the regime consolidated power and centralized state authority, the instruments of persecution emerged. Propaganda in the wake of a major political crisis in mid–1934 linked homosexuality to subversion, even treason, thereby encouraging public intolerance. In 1935, Nazi authorities rewrote criminal law Paragraph 175, and subsequent court interpretation radically expanded the range of punishable “indecencies between men.” Enforcement of Paragraph 175 fell to the Criminal Police and the Gestapo, unified by 1936 under the SS and its leader, Reichsführer–SS Heinrich Himmler.

          The nation’s police forces gained extraordinary authority to employ surveillance on suspect individuals and to seize and detain “enemies of the state.” During the 30 months from early 1937 to mid–1939, German police arrested almost 78,000 men under Paragraph 175, one–third of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison. Hundreds more were interned in concentration camps outside the legal process. All were subjected to brutal mistreatment at the hands of police, interrogators, and guards.

  12. Anne Peterson says:

    Only one group killed in the holocaust is allowed to claim to be victims? I have never heard anything so bizzare as that. And to object to that point of view cannot be using the holocaust to politicize. To object to that point of view is just fair and decent. Many groups were killeld by the Nazis and they are all victims. Only the most politically self absorbed could claim exclusive status.

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