Michael Safyan
1 min readJul 12, 2020

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This is a deeply ahistorical take. The Nazis were motivated by a racial ideology in which Jews were understood to be a 'race' and an inferior, non-Aryan (i.e. non-white) one at that whose existence threatened Nazi racial purity. The Nazis persecuted Jews as a "race" rather than a religion, which is why practicing Christians with even one Jewish grandparent were still persecuted as "Jews" by the Nazis; for the Nazis, Jews were targeted for their blood / ancestry / DNA / "race" rather than religion.

It is also important to note that the entire reason that Jews were in Europe to begin with was a result of the colonialism and imperialism of the Romans.

I fear that your article, in addition to being ahistorical, wrongly plays into "oppression olympics" and in creating oppression hierarchies. One can recognize that the Holocaust, slavery, colonialism, etc. were all bad without revising history or creating comparisons that are not only offensive but -- worse -- historically misleading.

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