Members of the Westboro Baptist Church, of Topeka, Kan., arrived at the University at 8:10 a.m., to protest against Rutgers Hillel, an affiliate of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, which is the largest Jewish campus organization in the world.

Westboro, an independent church headed by Fred Phelps and comprised mostly of his family members, is best known for picketing the funeral of Matthew Shepard in 1998, but it has also protested everything from the Marines to the Academy Awards. This week, Westboro is touring New Jersey.

Rutgers earned a visit because it has the fourth largest Jewish population of any campus in the nation. When Rutgers Hillel learned of Westboro’s intentions, they planned the counter-rally, called Rutgers Unite Against Hate, publicizing it through Facebook.

Jeff Rubin, a Washington, D.C. spokesman for Hillel, believes that visiting Rutgers was just part of Westboro’s national campaign to gain publicity.

“Westboro’s message that God hates a number of different groups is the exact opposite of what we believe,” he said.

He said that Hillel promotes a positive message of tolerance and community building. “We don’t like to be put in the position of being against anything.”

His advice for students was to remain calm and meet hatred with peace and tolerance.

Westboro’s members stood across the street and down the block from the 2nd Reformed Church, which had posted gay flags and welcome signs outside their door in solidarity with the gay and Jewish student population at Rutgers. They were so far from the Hillel building that protesting students could barely hear their chanting or read their signs, which included: “God hates you,” “Fag university,” ”Israel is doomed,” and “You’re going to hell.”

Eric Idelson held a sign that said, “God loves fags,” as he chanted “R-U, rah, rah!” Idelson is a member of Gamma Sigma, the only co-ed social fraternity on the campus. Approximately half of their members are gay and lesbian, he said. Other students carried signs that ranged from the serious – “Proud to be a Jew” – to the cheeky, like “God loves weed” and “God hates Pepsi.”

Other LGBT groups who showed support were BIGLARU, Bisexuals, Gays, Lesbians and Allies of Rutgers University, and LLEGO, an organization for queer students of color. Some dressed in drag and sloganed T-shirts, while others wore scarlet red, Rutgers’ school color, to show spirit.

LLEGO member Qualiyah Arrington said, “We just want to show them we’re proud of who we are.”

Before the counter-rally ended, the center handed out noisemakers so that students could drown out the protestors, but Westboro had already left.

According to a spokesman for the New Brunswick police department, Westboro had stated that they would stay for 30 minutes. At 8:45 a.m. they were on a bus to their next location.

Because they left so quickly, some students found the protest to be anti-climactic. “I was expecting a little more tension rather than a bunch of people just standing in the rain,” said one student, Pat McCatherine.

Minutes past 9 a.m. students dispersed, singing Rutgers chants and twirling noisemakers.

Rutgers Hillel’s annual three-day program Days without Hate is Nov. 2 to Nov. 4.

Under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code which banned sexual intimacy between members of the same gender, an untold number of gays and lesbians were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps where they were subjected to medical experiments including lobotomies, and forced to work in labor camps.

Estimates of gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis range from several thousand to a quarter million. A large number of those interred were sent on to the gas chambers.

“The murder of six million Jews and countless Roma, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, gay men and lesbians, trade unionists, disabled people and political and religious opponents of the Nazis was not a sudden and frenzied explosion of hate, but a horror that had been methodically and carefully planned,” said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a statement Tuesday.

“Hatred may begin with small acts of prejudice or bigotry – but it rarely ends with them. That is why we all have an obligation to stand up to hatred.”

Monuments to gays murdered during the Holocaust are in Berlin Copenhagen and Amsterdam in Europe, San Francisco and Sydney. A monument is planned in Tel Aviv, Israel.

In Jerusalem, the Yad Vashem Museum on the Holocaust features a small exhibit dedicated to gay and lesbian victims of the Nazis.

The American Holocaust Museum in Washington also has an exhibit dedicated to gays and lesbians.

Yet there remain Holocaust deniers.

Four years ago, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day in part to counteract “Holocaust deniers” like Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In 2003, Minnesota state Rep. Arlon Lindner (R) during debate on two bills he had brought forward to repeal gay rights laws in the state, said gays were lying when they cited thousands of homosexuals who were exterminated or sent to concentration camps by the Nazis.  

“It never happened,” Lindner told the House. 

“I was a child during World War II, and I’ve read a lot about World War II,” he said. “It’s just been recently that anyone’s come out with this idea that homosexuals were persecuted to this extent. There’s been a lot of rewriting of history.”

The remarks shocked the legislature, but attempts to censure him failed.

It made sense to me that a group who took pains to remember their own exclusion and suffering at many times since the days in the desert would worry about the same prejudice against others.

No wonder I am proud to be Jewish.

But on Friday, the GOP in Pennsylvania sent out a letter to Jewish voters encouraging them to vote for McCain because an Obama presidency would threaten the existence of Israel.

They likened the vote next week to the mistake many families (including some of my own) made when they didn’t flee Germany in the 1930s.

This kind of scare tactic is nothing new, but it never fails to infuriate me.

There is a perception that American Jews choose their candidate based on Israeli foreign policy issues and nothing else. Now no doubt Israel is one important issue, but to relegate a people to that kind of over-simplistic knee jerk voting is its own kind of discrimination.

To equate Barack Obama (a candidate who supports Israel) with Hitler presupposes that Jewish voters are just plain stupid.

If we want to talk about similarities between this election and past historical wrongs we could intelligently discuss book censorship (Palin supported it, so did the Nazi party) or the relegation of a group of people to second class (gay people who can’t marry and can’t adopt know something about that).

We could expect Jewish voters to care about these kinds of injustices and vote for a candidate who promotes equality and free speech rather than hindering it.

But let’s also keep in mind that blanket comparisons to the Holocaust are not useful because they are too general and not powerful because they ridiculously characterize the great tragedy of that time as equivalent to a difference in foreign policy experience between two candidates who have promised to protect and support Israel.

Jewish voters are not dumb, knee-jerk or simplistic in their political analysis.

They won’t fall for that kind of ploy.