Another great profile in liberal courage, this time from the Anti-Defamation League, conveniently joining the coordinated right-wing criticism of Senator Durbin for sticking up for international law and - eeks! - Muslims.
Gay people were killed in the Holocaust too. The ADL doesn't have a monopoly on Nazis. Their rebuke is wrong, inappropriate, gratuitous, and smacks of an effort to curry favor with the White House. Yet another example of a once-great organization that has since passed its prime and usefulness. (Gee, am I gonna get a nasty letter too now?)
Just to check with the ADL, but was Pol Pot close enough to the Nazis for you? How about Stalin killing tens of millions of his own people? Does that get close enough? The murder of a million people in Rwanda?
Here's my favorite part of the ADL letter to Durbin:
Whatever your views on the treatment of detainees and alleged excesses at the Guantanamo Bay facility, it is inappropriate and insensitive to suggest that actions by American troops in any way resemble actions taken by Nazis in their treatment of prisoners. Suggesting some kind of equivalence between their interrogation tactics demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about the horrors that Hitler and his regime actually perpetrated.Really? Wow. Nothing our soldiers could ever do could EVER EVER EVER compare to what the Nazis did to their prisoners. Wow. Is that because we're Amurikans and, you know, that 'banality of evil' thing doesn't infect us? Was it just genetic, the whole Nazi thing?
So, attacking prisoners with dogs, did the Nazis do that? How about summary executions of innocent untried people, simply because they're of a faith or a race that makes them suspect? Any of that happen in Nazi Germany? The debasing of the faith of an entire people? Attacks on women, children? Mass dehumanization of people without any due process whatsoever? And how about an incredible hubris that our way is the right way, the law and rules of humanity be damned? No, none of that. And particularly the guy on the floor at Gitmo with all of his hair in a ball on the floor next to him because he pulled it all out in a fit of insanity, THAT in particular was MUCH MORE HUMANE than what happened in Nazi camps, per the ADL.
I just want to make sure our PC meter is operating properly the next time we discuss the Nazis. Because, you know, God forbid anybody tried to learn from the mistakes of the Nazis and ensure that no modern government in our time, or our country, started making those same mistakes and leading us or anyone else down that same path. Oh no. The ADL has appeared to have adopted the Republican line on Nazi Germany. One big abberation. Yep. Won't ever happen again, so don't you DARE even suggest you're seeing indications of it happening, anywhere.
Way to learn from history, guys.
Or is it simply that this time around the victims are Mulsim, so that makes it okay?
