The Holocaust Revisited—An Open Thank You Note to Ed Schultz

Roger L Simon

Dear Ed,

May I call you Ed? You can certainly call me Roger.

I know you’ve been taking a lot of flak for that Tweet you made the other day — “Gay people were really the ones being persecuted in Hitler’s Germany” — some calling you about as sensitive as Attila the Hun and wondering why NBC Universal would allow such a bizarre personality to represent them in public, sort of like asking Donald Sterling to host their morning show.
And I realize too that you quickly deleted the Tweet after a deluge of responses from normal human beings.
But, even with all that, I just wanted to say thank you, sir, for my family and for myself!
You see you have solved the mystery of why my grandmother’s Uncle Lennie, “the bachelor,” was incinerated at Auschwitz.  Unfortunately, his sexual preference did not appear on ancestor.com.  But now we know.

It’s clear from your writing that Lennie’s Jewish identity would not have been enough, even though, as I’m sure you are aware as a prestigious political commentator at MSNBC, some recent investigators, including a French priest, have asserted that the stratospheric number of Jewish dead could actually be revised upwards.
And then, as you also must know, there are many groups besides Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, among them Poles, Slavs, Serbs, gypsies, Soviet POWs, some leftists (although the Nazis began as a left-wing party), the mentally and physically disabled and, of course, gays.  Hitler was, in his way, an equal opportunity genocidal maniac.
It’s interesting, however, that you single out gays as the most persecuted (can there be a most dead?).  Have you ever considered why you might have done that?  I know introspection isn’t exactly your style, but Twitter is the new media platform for the id, fairly begging us to reveal our innermost thoughts instantaneously in 140 or fewer characters.  I know.  I have made the mistake of doing so myself and, yes, having to hit the delete button in embarrassment.
Nevertheless, to my knowledge, I never exhibited anything approaching  your level of bigotry.  So although I am extremely grateful for your solving my family’s Uncle Lennie problem, I would advise you to take some serious time off.  Like the aforementioned Donald Sterling,  the kind of statements you like to make are probably better made in private, preferably in a therapist’s office.
And as for your handlers at NBC, I would suggest to them that commentary like that given by Mr. Schulz is better suited for the pages of Der Stürmer than the public airwaves in the United States.
Cordially yours,
Roger L. Simon
PS: No, I don’t really have an Uncle Lennie… at least as far as I know.  But I obviously could have — and a lot more.

Related: “Coming Soon: World War II, The Director’s Cut Edition,” at Ed Driscoll’s PJM column.