More Anti-Obama Comparisons Drawn

Martine Kaplan — June 29, 2009 – 5:01 pm | Abusive Holocaust Rhetoric | Barack Obama | GOP Hypocrisies | Republicans Comments (0) Add a comment

As I stated in my post last week about the Republican Women of Anne Arundel County letter to supporters, Godwin’s Law has been upheld nicely in the last couple of weeks. Yet another comparison to Hitler and Nazis has been made, this time by Joseph Farrah, founder and editor of WorldNetDaily:

“I hope my Jewish friends remember this well.  Many of them voted for Barack Obama. Many of them voted for Hillary Clinton. These are not your friends. These are the same kinds of people who turned away ships of Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1940s. These are the same kinds of people who appeased Adolf Hitler at Munich. These are the same kinds of people who made the reformation of the modern state of Israel so difficult. I say, ‘No more ethnic cleansing. No more official anti-Semitism accepted.’”

The fact that the historical comparisons don’t line up is not even the issue here. It’s just another example of an attack borne out of the lack of a fact-based argument. “Obama is a Nazi” or “Obama is an anti-Semite” are not arguments in and of themselves and pressure should be put on people like Farrah and Joyce Thomann to provide legitimate criticism if they have grievances to air.

The question, however, remains: how can someone who obviously recognizes the horror and atrocities of the Holocaust turn around and lay similar claims on another person?

Such hyperbole should not be tolerated on either side of the aisle. Every time a Jew accuses another Jew or a world leader of being like Hitler or a Nazi, he chips away at the seriousness and meaning of the terms. He degrades Holocaust history for us and for the rest of the world. The more such terms are allowed to be thrown around, the emptier they will become, and that is not worth whatever point Obama’s detractors are trying to get across.

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