On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, International Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked at the site of that mass murder in Poland, and throughout the world.

But amidst marking the systematic murder of six million Jews and countless other “undesirables” in the eyes of the Nazi regime, it has become increasingly fashionable for some commentators to attempt to shoehorn in their personal opinions and make false equivalencies.

In a January 27 report for CHCH entitled: “International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 80 years since Auschwitz liberation,” video journalist Roger Collins reported on commemorations of the day, showing footage from Auschwitz and an interview with a Holocaust survivor.

However, the second half of the report soon veered sharply into what we consider to be overt editorialization and Holocaust minimization, with Collins telling viewers that “similar painful themes play out on the world stage today.”

The broadcast then showed footage of families of Israeli hostage families, before pivoting to scenes from the Gaza Strip, where Collins said that “their pain is mirrored across the border.”

While there is no doubt that there is indeed suffering amongst both Israelis and Palestinians, to compare the Hamas massacres in Israel (and the ensuing war and suffering in Gaza) with the Holocaust is a gross distortion of history.

Collins continued by citing the Russia-Ukraine war, and said that “in the US, an analogous situation is beginning to reverberate throughout the country,” citing “the separation of immigrant families… stories which are disturbingly similar” to the Holocaust.

Whatever one may think of these geopolitical issues, comparing them to the Holocaust is profoundly wrong from both an historical and a moral perspective.

Historically, the Holocaust was a state-sponsored effort to exterminate the entire Jewish People, a campaign that was so widespread, so effective and so extensive that the term “genocide” had to be created in order to describe what was previously indescribable.

Even by the standards of subsequent genocides, such as the mass killing in 1994 in Rwanda, the Holocaust stands apart in its level of organization and orchestration.

In contrast to the Holocaust, the Hamas-provoked war in Gaza could not be more different. Israel has not sought to exterminate the people of Gaza, and in fact the population in the coastal enclave has actually increased during the last 16 months of war, and Israel’s counter-terrorism operations have been noted by experts in urban warfare for their efforts in seeking to minimize civilian casualties, even as the Hamas terrorist group deeply embedded itself within Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Holocaust saw roughly two-thirds of European Jews murdered, shot in mass pits and in death camps specially constructed to murder them.

Video journalist Collins concluded the report by saying that stories of Holocaust survivors “urge us to reflect on the suffering of others today.”

Beyond the grotesque comparisons between the Hamas-Israel war and the Holocaust, the universalization of the Holocaust achieves, by design or by accident, the watering down of history and is a form of Holocaust distortion. As one Holocaust scholar put it, “the universalization of the Holocaust has the unintended consequence of erasing the unique history and oppression of the Jewish people…we must acknowledge that this erasure devalues the Jewish experience and ignores the historical realities of Jewish oppression.”

Whatever Roger Collins of CHCH was seeking to achieve in his January 27 report, by drawing a comparison between the Holocaust and other incomparable current events, he maligned the memory of the victims of the Nazi extermination machine.