The frenzy builds
by digby
This was just a mistake according to Tucker Carlson:
WTF Daily Caller pic.twitter.com/CxrA4TI6rC
— Timothy Johnson (@timothywjohnson) February 18, 2015
I know it’s lame to point out “imagine if the other side did this” stuff. But this one struck me as worth mentioning because we are currently obsessing over religion and the middle east and European anti-semitism and the like and I have to assume that if it had been TPM making this mistake the right would not be dismissive. And not just because it’s a cheap gotcha (which it normally would be.) Many people on the right have come to genuinely believe that anyone who isn’t a conservative is hostile to Jews and Christians because they secretly favor the terrorists.
But none of that is the real point. Take a look at the mistaken headline’s article:
The Nazis forced all Jews living in Germany to wear a yellow Star of David as a cloth armband. The message this was meant to send was, “Take care, the wearer of this patch is a filthy, sub-human scum unfit to live among decent people like us Germans.”
This atrocity was happening in the 1930s and no nation, including the United States, took up the Jewish cause even though this was far more than just an anti-Jewish event. At stake was worldwide life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Today the free nations of the world have a golden opportunity to make amends for their failure in the 1930s to protect decency, fairness, brotherhood and honor. But back then no nation faced down Hitler at the League of Nations and called him to task. Instead, it was almost as if the Jews were expected to apologize for surviving Hitler’s murderous attacks.
Now in the Middle East Muslim nations like Iran are publicly saying they want to kill every Jew on the face of the earth. So why shouldn’t the Jews want to sit down and negotiate they ask. Hitler and the Nazis, with the quiescence of the League of Nations, were leading a word wide assault not just on the Jews but also on the world’s Christians, like cleric Niemoeller. Today Muslims, with the quiescence of the United Nations, are leading an assault on the world’s liberty and freedom just as the Nazis did, and again no one is protesting.
Now it is obviously true that there is carnage and mayhem happening in the middle east. This has been happening for some time as anyone who has followed the news for the past few decades. It’s horrifying. It always has been. But here you have a fool conflating the horrors of Nazi germany with both Iran and ISIS which are actually at odds with one another. It doesn’t matter. “Muslims” are the enemy and that enemy is just like Hitler’s Germany.
I don’t think anyone is underplaying the barbarity of ISIS. They are acting like a medieval army using the same terror tactics that were used a thousand years ago. It’s very frightening to us in the 21st century to see these horrible acts carried out. That’s the point. But it’s that medieval nature of this threat that makes it totally absurd to conflate them with the threat of Naziism. The Germans were a thoroughly modern state with highly developed technical capability and a professional military. They were a major European power that sought, as many European nations and kingdoms had done for centuries before them, to conquer other nations, seize their land and expand their empire. But their particular evil was unprecedented and sui generis because of the industrial, mechanized nature of it, the way it coldly used modern manufacturing methods to create factories of death. It was exactly the opposite of ISIS, which is pre-modern and primitive in its methods.
The only way in which they are modern is in their use of these methods as propaganda tools to make the West overreact so they might recruit others to their cause. They do not have the military capability or the know-how to present an existential threat to the west as Germany did. It’s estimated they have 20-30,000 members. At the moment the entire middle east is in turmoil, many of its member states horrified at the rise of ISIS. The extremists need a common enemy to recruit their army and they are obviously trying to provoke the West into action so it will overreact and provide one.
ISIS is finishing the destabilization of the region that began a long time ago (with our help, by the way.) But it is not an existential threat to the US or to Europe. And if they made even the slightest move against Israel they surely know the wrath of the entire west would rain down upon them and they could not win that fight. They do not seem to be that stupid. So prematurely ginning this up into a world-wide threat on the level of WWII would seem to be counter-productive to say the least.
Even though they are a bunch of hideous monsters, they are different monsters than the Nazis, very different. Failing to recognize that is the first step to making serious mistakes in a way that could be catastrophic. The man who wrote the piece is a retired General named Jerry Curry, a full-blown right wingnut, easy to dismiss. But he’s not alone, unfortunately. This came from the US Department of state:
Once you start with that kind of comparison, you’re laying out a moral obligation for full-fledged war. Maybe there is one. But unless we are prepared to engage in yet another war based on lies and false premises, they need to stop lazily shouting “Nazis!” and pruriently obsessing over these hideous snuff videos and explain what they are talking about when they insist we must “act”. And more importantly, they need to explain how this is all supposed to end. ISIS isn’t Germany and the war won’t be WWII with celebrations of V-I day in Times Square. So what will it be?
.