Can’t people take a joke?
Regarding “Virginia candidate under fire for cartoon” (July 4), Paul Milde was mocking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) idiotic video about calling what’s going on in the detention camps at the U.S.-Mexico border by saying that all one needs to do to create a “concentration camp” is to fence in a few children in a living room.
Of course it’s obviously not the same. This isn’t just a question about having a sense of humor and mocking another person who is completely in the wrong in her analysis. It’s also about how much one can be overly sensitive about something to the point of seeing red whenever the words “concentration camp” are used, even when the phrase is used incorrectly.
It is Ocasio-Cortez who should be labeled the insensitive one. Having said that, while I can see why some think Milde is being insensitive and tasteless, people should remember that he is also making a parody.
And then we should ask: at what time can mocking something and making it a parody be completely off limits, especially as it relates to The Holocaust?
After all, even a lot of Jews thought “The Producers” (the play and the film) was hysterical, including its “Springtime for Hitler.”
ROBERT GOODMAN
Silver Spring
Parking tax is no joke
Regarding “Repeal the parking tax” (Editorial, June 27), of course President Trump, who uses an eponymous charitable organization as his personal slush fund, would have no problem targeting legitimate nonprofits whose altruistic endeavors put him to shame.
As such, the Trump administration’s parking tax, as punitive as it may be, fits right in. The only problem with it is a marketing one: bearing as it does the dyspeptic moniker “2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.”
In deference to the Republican Party’s dedicated Orthodox Jewish constituency, it should have been called the Tzitzit Act, inasmuch as transportation benefits such as parking and transit passes constitute fringe benefits.
SHLOMO KAHN
Pikesville
Kushner peace plan is no joke, either
The editorial cartoon in your July 4 edition severely misrepresented relations between the United States and the Palestinian Arabs. The cartoon, sarcastically titled “The Olive Branch,” depicted Trump adviser Jared Kushner offering a single olive on a toothpick to a disheartened looking Palestinian Arab man, from a table labeled “Jared Kushner-Donald Trump Mideast Peace Plan.”
Kushner just the other week organized an international summit in order to raise $50 billion for the Palestinian Arabs. That’s on top of the $10 billion that the United States already gave to the Palestinian
Authority between 1994 and 2017. To compare that to a single olive is absurd.
MOSHE PHILIPS
The writer is the national director of Herut North America’s U.S. Division.
