President of B.C. Teachers Ass'n Compares Striking Teachers to...Anne Frank?
And why not? After all, a picketing pedagogue in 2012 Canada and a young Jewish girl who was captured by Nazis and sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhus, have soooo much in common. From the Winnipeg Free Press:
VANCOUVER -- Whatever the outcome of their ugly wage dispute, British Columbia teachers have to decide whether they want to be viewed as professionals... or professional rabble-rousers.
They've got to start toning down their over-the-top rhetoric about Bill 22, the back-to-work law, and other labour contract issues. At least if they want the public respect they insist they deserve.
Comparing teachers' treatment by the B.C. legislature to that of the Jews by Hitler and the Nazis, for example, works against the very thing they say they're fighting for.
Yes, Wendy Turner, president of the Cranbrook District Teachers Association, wrote to The Province to say that, as a child, she'd read Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl and had asked her parents: "How could they do this to people?"
Her parents told her it was because the German people didn't realize what was happening until it was too late. "Why was it too late?" she apparently asked. "Because by then it was the law!"
Turner said she'd forgotten those words until she realized "history was repeating itself" with the Liberals using legislation "to legitimize their stripping away of employment rights for a targeted group of people -- teachers."
Now, in the field of rhetoric, there's something called the fallacy of single similarity. It's when two different things are claimed to be the same because of one way in which they're alike.
Only an educational zealot, however, could find even a single point of similarity between Frank's wartime predicament and that of today's pampered B.C. teachers -- who aren't forced to hide out from racist authorities to avoid death or starvation in concentration camps.
Sadly, though, some of our unionized teachers seem to live in a world of exaggeration, with an exaggerated sense of their own importance...
No kidding.
Unfortunately, that kind of obscenely inapt analogizing has the effect of desensitizing people to warnings of pending genocide, even in cases where the warnings are warranted, e.g., the genocidal designs of several Moslem polities on the State of Israel, or the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Christians from Moslem lands. If everything is a Holocaust, many will conclude that perhaps nothing is. Unsupported accusations of racism have much the same effect.
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