If the Left succeeds in cancelling Greg Gutfeld over his “anti-Semitic” remarks on “The Five,” there are few other public figures who have earned the same treatment in the same way. Among them is Art Spiegelman, author of the widely-admired Maus, a graphic novel dealing with the Holocaust.

Maus tells the story of Holocaust survivor Vladek and how he explains the events of the war to his young son Art growing up in the U.S. Largely autobiographical, the comic was published in two volumes in 1986 and 1987 to considerable acclaim, eventually gaining a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

One of the major themes of Maus concerns the strategies needed to survive the genocidal actions of the Nazis. A major component involved skills that could be traded for food and favors, as well as creating an impression of value in the minds of SS guards and officials. These skills could be quite simple. Vladek, for instance, had picked up cobbling, a critical skill in a place like Auschwitz, where the clothing was poor to begin with and is seldom or never replaced when it wore out. In a widely excerpted series of panels, Vladek explains to his son the best way to repair a pair of boots.

Vladek’s skill as a cobbler plays a crucial role in Volume II. His wife Anja, imprisoned in another part of the Auschwitz complex, is being tormented by a vicious Kapo (KampPolizei – turncoat prisoners used by the Nazis to control the others). Learning that the Kapo’s boots are in bad shape, Vladek offers to repair them, gaining Anja better treatment.

This, of course, is exactly what Gutfeld was saying in his comment that “…you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful… Utility kept you alive!” This a direct echo of what Vladek Spiegelman had to say, along with numerous other Holocaust survivors, including (as Gutfeld himself pointed out) Viktor Frankl. Survival in the Nazi extermination camps, among the most lethal places ever constructed on earth, required both luck and skill.

So how, exactly, does agreeing with survivors like Frankl and Spiegelman turn Greg Gutfeld into an anti-Semite?

It doesn’t, of course, but that’s not the point. Recall Gina Carano, who in 2021 was cancelled for making the straightforward and undeniable observation that leftist goon squads such as Antifa and BLM were adapting wholesale the tactics of the Nazi Brownshirts. If Carano was anti-Semitic, then FDR, Harry Truman, Churchill, Einstein, and every last man who landed on the beaches at Normandy were too.

The intent is to create a climate in which any comment made about the Jews, the Holocaust, or the Nazis is treated as anti-Semitic, except when made by such stalwart supporters of Judaism as Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Having deployed the race card with some success, the American Left is attempting to utilize the “Holocaust card.” This is obnoxious, intolerable, and despicable, and it needs to stop.

Image: PenguinRandomHouse