Editor,
Craig Wiesner’s guest perspective (“Can we be as creative as the Danes?” in the Tuesday, July 3 edition of the Daily Journal) expressing hope that we Americans can behave like Danes in the 1940s draws heavily on his Jewish roots and family history. It’s wistful reading but irrelevant.
The level of current anti-Semitism in Denmark is frightening. Jews who wear anything in public identifying them as such makes them susceptible to physical attack by some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees Denmark has accepted from countries where 100 percent of the people have been traumatized by war and their own religious fanatics.
Mr. Wiesner uses his theory to attack the immigration policies of the Trump presidency. He says that the wave of migrants on our southern border are “fleeing their own holocausts in places like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, where gangs rule the streets and governments are either helpless, simply look the other way, or are complicit in the mayhem as innocents are slaughtered.”
In saying this, he trivializes the industrial-scale murder of millions of Jews by Germans and their European helpers by comparing it with the degradation of Central American societies whose misery can no doubt be partly ascribed to previous U.S. administrations, Democrat and Republican alike.
False analogies simply confuse the issue. Danes in 1940 defied the Nazis, but in 2018 they are wilting under the onslaught of a different evil, and losing the battle.
Desmond Tuck
San Mateo
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