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Our sponsorship by four, small student ministry groups and the beleaguered, campus Republican Club hardly qualify as Mrs. Rodham Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy." How ironic that a racist group, laughably calling itself "Anti-Racist Action," lamely tries to change the subject by shouting crude racial slurs at African American pro-life activists whom they patronize as "having been manipulated by white people." A black faculty member parroted this same mean-spirited bigotry as he scurried past the exhibit, lacking the integrity to even discuss the issue with black members of our staff. The difference between education and indoctrination is that the former invites healthy heterodoxy but the latter demands rigid orthodoxy. Venerating multiculturalism while punishing philosophical pluralism is cynical, hypocritical and unworthy of a great university.
In any event, students were left to wonder how it could be "racist" for CBR's black and Jewish staff to compare violence against the unborn with violence against their own black and Jewish peoples? Then "The Heathen Left" invoked the ultimate boogieman, by attempting to link us to "The Religious Right." Never mind that The National Right to Life Committee is staffed by well-intentioned "pro-life moderates" who disfavor projects of this sort. Never mind that we have never even met the leadership of the Christian Coalition (whose influence is waning with IRS denial of tax-exempt status). And never mind that Operation Rescue (though we love the spirit of Rescue and Rescuers) has never been involved in any GAP presentation. "Watched our funding" indeed. If the mainstream organizations of the "Religious Right" ever offered more than token opposition to social evil, we would faint dead away. But the facts hardly matter to pro-aborts desperate to dance away from the real issue.
ABORTION IS GENOCIDE
Thanks to GAP, however, avoiding that issue is now harder than ignoring a train wreck in your bathroom. The Columbus Dispatch, in its Tuesday, October 20, 1998, confirms this thesis with a story headlined: "Anti-abortion display meant to shock" with a subhead reading "Genocide awareness group puts banners on OSU campus."
With a pre-calculus midterm on her mind, Heather Crawford wasn't receptive to shock-value visual images displayed at Ohio State University yesterday.
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'I don't really agree with the tactic of using the KKK and the Holocaust. I don't see how it impacts abortion,' said Crawford, a freshman from Findlay, Ohio.
'The display isn't expected to change the views of anyone whose mind has been made up,' Cunningham said, 'but to encourage the undecided to consider the position that abortion represents a devaluation of life.'
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The display gets the point across, said Jessica Evans, 18, who is anti-abortion. The freshman from Yorkville, Ohio, looked away when she saw the photos.
The banners gave Scott Gallagher reason to briefly re-examine his stance on the volatile issue. 'It's disgusting; it's upsetting.'
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Representatives from the Hillel Foundation oppose the use of Holocaust imagery in the contest of abortion protest.
'Using the image of the Holocaust and victims of the Holocaust is offensive to the Jewish people and to survivors,' Hillel Executive Director Joseph Kohane said. 'Using one people's disaster, one of the most painful in history, for political ends betrays the lack of belief that their own cause can carry them.'
Perhaps Mr. Kohane doesn't know that Martin Luther King also invoked the imagery of the Jewish Holocaust because in the darkest days of the struggle for civil rights, he too "lacked a belief that his own cause could carry him." It would have been narcissistic for victims of the Jewish "disaster" to which Mr. Kohane refers to deny Dr. King's comparison and selfishly appropriate this imagery for the exclusive benefit of their "one people." It would be just as narcissistic to deny the right of pro-life advocates to draw the same comparison.
Holocaust remembrance activists use these pictures to ensure that no one will forget the evil of Jewish suffering; we use them to ensure that no one will forget that abortion suffering is just as evil. They urge universal acceptance of responsibility for achieving "the political end" that a Holocaust can "never again" victimize their people. CBR agrees that everyone should protect; but we also believe that everyone should be protected. Paradoxically, survivors of one genocide are helping perpetrate another, both here and abroad.
Jewish Rabbi Jacob Neusner asserts just this comparison of Holocaust genocide with abortion genocide. He is a professor of religion at the University of South Florida, Tampa and Bard College, New York. While GAP was on display at Ohio State, he published an article containing the following excerpts in the October 26, 1998, issue of Christianity Today:
... [H]ow is mass abortion in the State of Israel such as is practiced by the secular (but not the religious) portion of the Israeli population not comparable to mass murder of Jewish Children in German Europe?
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As the numbers mount up, when do considerations of volume enter in and validate calling the annihilation of millions of lives "a Holocaust?" I think they do. Here is a Holocaust today. Every Jewish child born in the State of Israel is a survivor of the Holocaust sustained by Israeli law.
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The difference is, Germany has acknowledged its shame. But for the annual annihilation of tens of thousands of Jewish children, the State of Israel acknowledges nothing.
Nor does the United States of America. That was clear from the comments of some (but not all) of the students quoted in The Lantern, Tuesday, October 20, 1998:
[Headline] Graphic images spark abortion debate [Sidebar headlined] Contention, discourse follow abortion display at other schools
Vivid signs comparing abortion to the Holocaust and the lynching of blacks caused heated discussions Monday between passers-by and members of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform on the Oval.
'Abortion is genocide,' said Gregg Cunningham, director .... 'We want to get these images into students' heads now so that the images will come to their minds later.'
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Allie Berson from the Holocaust Awareness Council at the Hillel Foundation was also on the Oval passing out protest flyers and talking with students.
'I find it extremely offensive that (the Genocide Awareness Project) is using atrocities from the Holocaust for political debate against abortion,' said Berson, a junior majoring in interior merchandising. 'There has to be a better way for them to get their point across,' Berson said.
The Holocaust Awareness Council was just one organization that opposed the display.
Elyse Latella, who protested with other members of the Feminist Majority Alliance, dressed in black and held a sign which read 'Satanists for Life.'
'The signs were a radical way of mocking the Genocide Awareness Project,' said Latella, a senior majoring in women's studies.
'Our organization takes a pro-choice stance and is specifically geared toward this group because their tactics correlating abortion and genocide are wrong,' Latella said.
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