David Simon defends and expands on his comment last year berating the Jewish community for not doing more for urban blacks, which he likened to “a Holocaust in slow motion":
No, there is no barbed wire around West Baltimore. No, there is no political imperative to segregate them from the greater society, or ultimately, to murder them en masse. That would be a Holocaust at normal speed. Instead, we have simply participated—either tacitly or actively—in constructing a national economic model that throws away 10 to 15 percent of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens. There is no work for more than half the adult black males in Baltimore. Other than the drug corners, of course. Can anyone argue that the percentage of human destruction among adult males of color in these neighborhoods has not for generations approached the genocidal?
… We like to tell ourselves that we are educating the world about the extraordinary nature of the Shoah, that we are sensitizing them to the breadth and depth of the horror. In fact, the opposite occurs. By holding ourselves aloof from the rest of human tragedy, by denying any possible points of comparison, we desensitize ourselves. And we only manage to alienate the rest of the world from their natural commonalities with the Holocaust experience.
I have very mixed feelings about this. I believe that the deliberateness, scale and industrialization of mass murder in the Holocaust places it in a unique position in the annals of human evil. I resisted the attempt of Larry Kramer to analogize the AIDS epidemic as a Holocaust either. But Simon's warning that it should not be used to minimize the brutal segregation and immiseration of the inner cities is surely correct. Not that I know of many who make this argument explicitly.
The Dish 