No holds barred: Sean Spicer was right to point out Assad’s evil

It’s time to applaud and thank President Trump and his administration – Spicer included – for taking decisive action in Syria to save Arab life.

By SHMULEY BOTEACH
Updated: APRIL 17, 2017 22:43
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, US, April 11, 2017 (photo credit: REUTERS)
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, US, April 11, 2017
(photo credit: REUTERS)
For two days I was in a news blackout due to the Passover holiday. The festival ended and I saw that my inbox was filled with media asking me to comment on White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s remarks about Hitler, poison gas, and the Holocaust. As a rabbi, I couldn’t broadcast on the Jewish holy day, but I feel Spicer deserves defending after his apology, so here goes.
Hitler was the most evil man that ever lived. He gassed, shot, and burned six million Jews and started wars that led to the deaths of approximately 100 million people. He was a monster the likes of which the world has never seen. No one should be compared to Hitler.
Hitler is the godfather of all modern genocides and all those who attempt the extermination of an ethnic group are Hitler’s ideological stepchildren. Genocide did not start with Hitler, but with the Ottoman Turks and their mass murder of the Armenians during World War I, a genocide that the amoral world still barely recognizes. But Hitler has become mass murder’s poster child and was responsible for the most far-reaching and all-encompassing genocide of all time.
Spicer is right to point out Assad’s relationship with Hitler since the Syrian butcher is attempting a genocide of Sunni Muslims in Syria carried out by Alawite militias, Shia Iran, and Hezbollah, which is also Shia. All of this has been aided and abetted by Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin. Spicer is correct to point out that the use of nerve agents against one’s own people is a unique form of evil from which Assad can now never escape.
Assad should be removed because no man who gasses his people must ever be allowed to stay in power.
Where Spicer was absolutely wrong was when he said that Hitler had not used chemical gas against his own people, given that Hitler murdered something in the region of 200,000 German Jews during the Holocaust, not to mention the millions of others who were gassed at Birkenau, Belzec, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and so many other camps.
I understand what Spicer was trying to say, namely, that there were areas where Assad was even worse than Hitler insofar as the Damascus butcher used chemical gas on the battlefield, something, interestingly, that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany did in World War I, but the Wehrmacht seemed not to have used gas in battlefield conditions in the Second World War.
Spicer was wrong, though, because all of Europe was a battlefield during the war and the gas chambers where 1.5 million Jewish children met their end was history’s most horrible use ever of chemical agents in war.
Spicer apologized and, it seems, he did so sincerely, much regretting his mistake. He deserves to be forgiven and we should move on.
Those who wrote blogs calling Spicer an antisemite are guilty of character assassination and debasing the term. The Jews have real enemies in the world. Sean Spicer has used his pulpit at the White House to repeatedly defend the Jewish State and condemn genocidal Iran. He should be considered a friend of the Jewish people.
What is far more important to me as a member of a people who experienced genocide is that the Trump regime decided to reverse course from previous American inaction at the gassing of Syrian children and strike hard at the Assad regime showing them that Never Again must mean just that – Never Again.
I have no doubt that former president Barack Obama was well intentioned when, rather than enforcing his redline in August of 2013 after Assad gassed to death more than 1,000 innocent Arabs, he chose not to attack Assad but to forge his ultimately fraudulent deal with Assad to remove his chemical weapons instead. However, intentions don’t count when it comes to mass murder. You either take action or you don’t. Obama chose not to, and his inaction will forever stain his legacy.
President Donald Trump and his people may not have found all the right words in defending their attack on Assad. Spicer certainly did not. However, when it comes to combating genocide, words are trivial and action is everything. I am grateful to Sean Spicer and the members of the Trump team for taking action to give value to innocent Arab life.
For nearly four years we watched as America became a toothless tiger in relation to Syria, forever huffing and puffing but never striking at Assad for the use of nerve agents against children. Surely even the biggest Trump haters applaud the president for his honorable action at striking back at the beast.
The crime of the Holocaust is unique in world history. It brooks no comparisons, but genocides of any stripe are humanity’s highest abomination and poison gas is poison gas. America had a moral responsibility to hit the Assad regime for dropping sarin gas on children. Nothing that can be said about that action will ever be as important as the action itself. To see Syrian jets smoldering in ruins at the hands of the American military is take just pride in being citizens of the most righteous nation on earth.
Many of the memoirs of Auschwitz survivors relate how the prisoners prayed daily that they might see American bombers punishing the SS for operating the gas chambers at Birkenau. They prayed even though they knew that such bombing runs would cost them their own lives, but the bombers never came, thereby forever staining the legacies of even truly great men like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who ultimately defeated Hitler.
I earlier noted that 7 April, the day in Syria when Trump struck, was the commemoration of the Rwandan genocide. More than 800,000 people were hacked to death in three months in 1994. The world watched in silence as the Tutsis were dismembered before the eyes of the world. The Clinton administration did not lift a finger to help them and in 1998 President Clinton traveled to Rwanda to apologize. His words, as usual, were eloquent, but surely the people of Rwanda would have preferred mistaken comments by Clinton’s press secretary matched by action to stop the slaughter rather than an eloquent apology that was too little, too late.
It’s time to applaud and thank President Trump and his administration – Spicer included – for taking decisive action in Syria to save Arab life. Because only action, and not words, are that which will ensure that Never Again means Never Again.
The writer is the international bestselling author of 30 books including his most recent, The Israel Warrior. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.