You know the gubernatorial campaign is heating up when Adolf Hitler gets dragged into it. In today’s development, two prominent Jewish leaders have called upon Jerry Kilgore to pull his pro-death-penalty ad that mentions Hitler — and to apologize. The Jewish leaders were Richmond lawyer Tommy Baer, a former president of B’Nail Brith International, and Rabbi Jack Moline of Alexandria, a former president of the Washington Board of Rabbis.
According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the two men directed their criticism at Stanley Rosenbluth (himself Jewish), who had appeared in the Kilgore ad. Rosenbluth, whose son and daughter-in-law had been murdered, chastised Tim Kaine for his tangential involvement in saving the couple’s killer from execution. As paraphrased by reporter Tyler Whitley, Baer and Moline said that Rosenbluth, “by invoking the name of Hitler, had trivialized the Holocaust and insulted its victims.” Said Whitley: “The two used such terms as blasphemous, sacrilegious, callous and cynical to describe the ad.”
My, my, my. I would characterize such scathing criticism as fully justified for someone who, to pick a hypothetical example, not that it would ever happen, compared President George Bush to Adolf Hitler.
But Rosebluth didn’t compare Tim Kaine to Adolf Hitler. He referred to Kaine’s own words in an interview with Times-Dispatch reporters some time ago, in which Kaine was asked whether, given his faith-based opposition to the death penalty, he would have executed Hitler, Josef Stalin or Idi Amin. The T-D’s summary of his response:
While he said they deserve the death penalty, he said, “God grants life, and God should take it away. … They deserve the death penalty. I just — you know, I look at the world. Most nations have decided not to have a death penalty. And — many are very safe. I don’t think — I don’t think it’s needed to be safe.”
Draw your own conclusion as to whether Kaine would have pulled the switch on ol’ Adolf. To me, it doesn’t sound like he would have. And decide for yourself if Rosenbluth was out of line by saying, “Tim Kaine says that Adolf Hitler doesn’t qualify for the death penalty.”
You can agree or disagree, given the vagueness of Kaine’s remark, but Baer and Moline are just flat-out wrong. Neither Kilgore nor Rosenbluth “invoked” Hitler’s name gratuitously. They were addressing Tim Kaine’s response to a hypothetical question. I find nothing “blasphemous,” “sacrilegious,” “callous” or “cynical” about Rosenbluth’s remarks, or Kilgore’s decision to run the ad.
As Whitley wryly observed in his story, “Baer and Moline said they had not read the full transcript of Kaine’s remarks about the death penalty.” Looks to me like they jumped the gun. What I find “cynical” is the way Baer and Moline “invoked” the sanctity of the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jews to make a partisan attack on Jerry Kilgore.
