Adolf Hitler was elected March 5, 1933. He burned Jewish holy books publicly in Spring 1933. He issued the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. On November 9-10, 1938, he sent his Stormtroopers throughout Germany, burning down shuls (Orthodox synagogues) and temples (non-Orthodox Jewish houses of worship) and Jewish-owned stores, pillaging them and leaving German sidewalks strewn with broken glass — hence the term “Kristallnacht” (Night of the [Shattered] Crystal/Glass). In time, he was rounding up Jews and confining them to ghettoes. Later, he liquidated the ghettoes and herded the deported onto cattle cars for suffocating train rides to death camps. At the death camps, Hitler separated men from women, the able-bodied men from the weaker and more sickly males. The sickly and the children and many of the women were led to showers for de-lousing. At the showers, there was no de-lousing but instead the sealing of the overcrowded shower rooms, the dropping of Zyklon B poison-gas pellets, and the mass-gassing of thousands. In Auschwitz, Poland, for example, Hitler gassed 12,000 Jews to death every single day. Then the dead bodies were gathered. Gold fillings were extracted from teeth. Hair was shorn to stuff mattresses. In isolated instances, human fat was manufactured into soap. Ilse Koch, the Beast of Buchenwald, was accused of stripping victims’ skin to make lampshades. Remains then were taken to ovens, where they were cremated. Ashes rose from the chimneys night and day. The stench of burning human remains overwhelmed the air throughout regions abutting the death camps. Everyone knew what was happening. Everyone.

I understand why so many black Americans remain impacted by four hundred years of slavery here. Yes, America has changed profoundly and has evolved into a more “color-blind” society. (What other NATO country has elected a black head of government? Can you identify any prominent black men or women among other NATO countries?) We conservatives particularly despise identity politics and are especially color-blind in our daily dealings. Race is irrelevant, and oh how we thronged to the polls after that vicious Hillary Clinton diatribe, trying to play certain groups against her fictional basketful of deplorables! Of course we notice a person’s color. Just as we notice that Lucille Ball was and Emma Stone is a red head. Or that I wear a yarmulka. Or that Marilyn Monroe was a blonde. Or that Washington Nationals’ all-star pitcher Max Scherzer has two eyes of different colors. Just as we noticed that Elizabeth Taylor had violet eyes and Paul Newman blue eyes. We obviously notice color, but color does not matter to us. We eagerly take Clarence Thomas over Ruth Bader Ginsburg and sing praises for Dr. Ben Carson, Prof. Thomas Sowell, Sheriff David Clarke, Sen. Tim Scott, Shelby Steele… must we list everyone like at “Oscars” time? Yet, those 400 years of slavery understandably and absolutely are part of the African-American reality, even now that America long has changed.

That is what the Holocaust — the Shoah (pronounced: sho-AH’) — is to serious Jews. It defines an aspect of me, for example, even though all my forebears scrammed out of Tsarist Russia and nearby Galicia between 1881 and 1914. Just as my passion for baseball and my years growing up in 1960s Brooklyn define me. The reason that so many East Coast Jews ended up in stand-up comedy, why kibbitzing and joking is so endemic to the Jewish spirit and persona, is not because there was a Borscht Belt. Rather, the choice was binary: either (i) walk around angry all our lives and hold everyone, even the finest of people in this greatest of all countries, responsible for what other people did to us elsewhere, or (ii) move on productively and contribute eagerly alongside our fellow Americans in building this wonderful country. When the pain runs deep, one covers scars with humor, not unlike the pirate who sold corn-on-the-cob for a buccaneer. But the Holocaust is always there.

Yet I always have opposed the Edifice Complex of building Holocaust museums in America. I won’t visit any such memorial other than Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. I watch American Jews who are so assimilated that they do not eat kosher, do not make the Sabbath a special day, do not rear their children to learn the Torah, the Talmud, or any of their Judaic culture — and then salve their guilt for abandoning their heritage by building Holocaust museums. Those museums are ubiquitous, and I am among the rabbis who oppose them. That money instead should be spent on positive Judaic education for the future. Otherwise, why not an Inquisition Museum in every city? And a Pogrom Museum? And a Communism Museum, educating about the Jew-hating apostate Karl Marx and the worst anti-Jewish and anti-human institution ever created? And a Churban Museum, marking the Babylonian destruction of the First Holy Temple in Jerusalem and the Roman destruction of the Second Holy Temple and the fall of Betar?

The counter-argument from the Holocaust Museum Advocates always has been: “Others must understand what happened so that it does not happen again.” That nonsense now is exposed. A Holocaust Museum impacts for a tour, as does a good movie, but over time instead transmogrifies into a chameleon-like edifice that allows every cynic to manipulate and contort the Shoah to define their own narrative. Thus, after decades of Holocaust museum tours,70 percent of American Millennials never have heard of Auschwitz. And worse — instead of these museums educating the public to the unique evil of the Shoah, they instead have sprouted buds in the fickle minds of cable-news anchors intent on savaging the President and crafting despicable metaphors for besmirching this greatest of all countries, the United States. Indeed, now Jew-haters, too, contort the Shoah to condemn Israel.

Nary a day goes by without some idiot on MSNBC or CNN comparing something American to the Holocaust or the Nazis. The latest idiot on the horizon, Jill Wine-Banks, recently compared President Trump’s press conference in Helsinki with not only the Holocaust but also Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Consider the leftist media fools who see the human challenges posed at our southern border, as aliens try to enter the United States illegally rather than at ports of entry, and then bring children — maybe their own, maybe kidnapped, maybe rented, maybe purchased — as media shields. Inasmuch as a liberal Ninth Circuit federal court of appeals imposed a Flores Settlement that requires the Government to separate the children from the parents if the Illegals still are locked up after twenty days, suddenly the Democrats and their media mouthpieces are comparing the President and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Hitler.

It even is so crazy that a wild leftist who made his career by advocating for gay marriage in New Jersey got himself positioned to manipulate the name of Holocaust victim Anne Frank to smear the President and his Administration as “anti-Semitic.” And whom did he call an anti-Semite? A President whose daughter is an Orthodox Jew, married to his son-in-law who is an Orthodox Jew, and several of whose other children have married Jews. A President with Jewish grandchildren — something that many leading American Jewish community leaders, to their everlasting shame, cannot claim. A President who moved the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. A President who walked out of the corrupt and myopic Iran Deal. A President who walked out of the anti-Semitic United Nations “Human Rights” Council. A President whose Education Secretary visits yeshivas and praises them. A President whose Vice President rolled up his sleeves at a desecrated Jewish cemetery in Missouri and personally helped physically restore the cemetery grounds. (And, yes, even Mike Pence could be called a “Nazi” or otherwise anti-Semitic by the cynical leftists of the Democrat-Media-Entertainment-Academia Complex who repulsively manipulate the Holocaust to make their every argument.)

It not only is repulsive. It is sacrilege. The Shoah is not a surrogate retort to be leveraged by idiots otherwise incapable of constructing cogent arguments. Rather, it is for personal mourning and respectful contemplation. It is for Armenians, too, as they remember and mourn the 1.5 million Armenians whom the Turks murdered during the Hayots tseghaspanutyun — the Armenian Holocaust — of 1915-1918. To this day, a century later, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey will not admit that crime against humanity. (By the way, America is obligated under the terms of NATO to go to war alongside that dictatorial madman if Turkey invokes NATO Article 5.) Likewise, the Holocaust is for the victims of Pol Pot, who murdered between 1.5 million and 3 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. It is for the 500,000 to one million Tutsis murdered in Rwanda by the Hutus during the span of only 100 days in 1994. It is for the Ukrainian victims of Stalin’s Golodomor who were murdered in their millions from 1932-1933 by Communist Russia’s worst villain, every bit as evil as Hitler, even as the New York Times white-washed and covered up that Genocide as their Moscow-based reporter, Walter Duranty, got the Pulitzer Prize for two years of Fake News that he published praising Stalin during the height of the mass murders.

Those were Holocausts. And the most enormous of them all: from 1958-1962 Mao Tse-tung murdered 45 million Chinese. History’s worst mass murderer called that the “Great Leap Forward.” Yet no one ever hears of those Holocausts because, in most cases, they were massive crimes against humanity perpetrated by the political Left — primarily Communist — or in the Third World. Consequently, dead Rwandans merit one entertaining box-office film. And the millions of Ukrainian victims of Stalinist Russia, the tens of millions of victims of Communist China, the millions of victims of Communist Cambodia, the millions of victims of Turkey — nitchoho, meiyo, kmeanoavei, vochinch… in other words: nothing. In the face of such staggering crimes against humanity, Fidel Castro’s mass murder of 30,000 or more political opponents within his Cuban population of seven million — equivalent to murdering 680,000 people in the United States or even more — seems not to merit being termed a “Holocaust.” Nor, apparently, are all the other mass murders in their many millions perpetrated throughout the Communist world.

But Trump’s press conference alongside Putin does. Oh — and don’t forget to throw in Kristallnacht, Pearl Harbor (and how did they forget to add John Wayne Gacy, Albert DeSalvo, and Ted Bundy?). Among Democrats and other Liberals and Socialists — in tandem with their Media-Entertainment-Academia complex — it seems that there is no business like Shoah business. It is loathsome and sordid. Imagine if a Democrat Liberal had to hear the same kind of vomit 24/7 that we conservatives hear, something like:

“MSNBC is exactly the same as Julius Streicher’s Der Stuermer. Anderson Cooper is a Nazi prison guard, Elizabeth Warren caused Pearl Harbor and bombed the Twin Towers on 9/11. The New York Times is a Nazi publication. When the Democrats unanimously opposed the Trump tax cuts in both the House and the Senate, it felt like the Reichstag electing Hitler to be chancellor. When they opposed Neil Gorsuch it was identical to Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives. When Peter Strzok sent his texts to Lisa Page, it was like rounding up the Jews. When John Brennan accused the patriotic President of ‘treason,’ it was like Hermann Goering using the secret S.S. to mass-murder millions of Jews, gays, and Roma. When Van Jones on CNN accuses Trump supporters of voting based on race, it is exactly the same as putting Jews into gas chambers, then cremating their remains.”

But Republicans and other conservatives do not talk like that. We do not even think like that. So let a suggestion be offered to the Democrat-Media-Entertainment-Academia complex: If you need metaphors for hateful bigots among American presidents, use the Democrat bigot Woodrow Wilson and the Democrat Dip into the past and invoke the Democrats who went to war to preserve slavery while the Republicans gave their lives to end slavery in America. The Democrats who created the Ku Klux Klan. (The KKK actually has been called the “military arm of the Democratic Party.”) Prominent elected Democrats continued among KKK leaders and sympathizers even a century later, most infamously Klan Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd, whom the Democrats selected as their Majority Whip in the United States Senate. Or perhaps cite to liberal Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and liberal California Governor Earl Warren, who next would become the most liberal of Supreme Court chief justices, for rounding up and incarcerating more than 100,000 loyal patriotic Japanese Americans in the 1940s — all ratified 6-3 by the United States Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). (And the liberal Democrats now want assurances that no Supreme Court decision ever will be overturned?)

By contrast, contemplate that, in his every speech — going back to his Inaugural Address and his State of the Union — President Donald J. Trump regularly speaks of all colors bleeding the same color blood. Hitler? Really? And that he publicly takes personal pride that he has brought African-American unemployment and Hispanic/Latino unemployment to the lowest numbers ever recorded. Nuremberg laws? Does not the entire Nazi-Hitler-Kristallnacht line of comparisons truly extend beyond insane — and into the sphere of the objectively demented? Trump Derangement Syndrome indeed.

The message needs to go forth to the Democrat-Liberal-Media-Entertainment-Academia complex — from unbiased ethicists, any remaining honest historians, and theologians: Keep your damned hands off the Holocaust — and off 9-11 and off Pearl Harbor — and just seal your lips shut the next time you have the uncontrollably gurgling urge to vomit a metaphor comparing those crimes-against-humanity or the crime of treason to our American democracy and to a President who faithfully complies daily with the Constitutional restraints that limit his options in dealing with a Congress whose Democrats are sworn to perpetual “Resistance,” while a Deep State devoted to his impeachment and downfall now is revealed to exist within the deepest bowels of the intelligence apparatus. He even faces an unbalanced recent CIA director who voted in the 1976 Presidential election for the Communist Party’s Marxist pro-Soviet Gus Hall. (Talk about collusion with Russia!) President Trump likewise consistently has honored the Constitutional boundaries as he endures wild overreaching by Obama-appointed judges who legislate from the bench and then impose their rulings beyond their legitimate jurisdictions onto the entire nation.

Likewise, the expression “Never Again” does not belong to others, even if Holocaust Survivors failed to trademark it. Let others find their own slogan. Imagine if racists, ethanol farmers, or flip-phone users started marching behind the banner of “We Shall Overcome.” It really is time to demand that CNN and MSNBC anchors and analysts cease and desist from hurling Holocaust metaphors and likewise stop desecrating the martyrs of Pearl Harbor and 9-11. The joke has worn thin, and the Left Media-Entertainment-Academia complex have bestowed on Hitler a posthumous victory because the terms “Nazi” and “Holocaust” have been stripped of their meanings and now are just two more synonyms for CNN’s use of “Stormy Daniels” and Maniacal Maxine’s “Impeach 45.”