Way back during the debate over the Iran nuclear deal, there was a lot of manufactured outrage among liberals whenever opponents of the agreement made comparisons to the Holocaust.
Whether it was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoking the Holocaust to criticize the deal, conservatives likening it to the Munich agreement with Adolf Hitler or Mike Huckabee’s suggestion that the deal would enable a second Holocaust, liberals were up in arms.
But the supposed ban on making Holocaust analogies has suddenly been lifted during the current controversy over whether to let Syrian refugees into the United States. Suddenly, liberals think it’s perfectly okay to liken concerns about letting the refugees in to the refusal to allow Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism into the U.S. during the 1930s.
In a column titled, “Republicans’ xenophobic bidding war,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank writes, “This growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939.”
In another Washington Post article titled, “What Americans thought of Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II,” author Ishaan Tharoor points to polls from the late 1930s signalling opposition to allowing Jewish refugees in to the U.S., and notes, “Today’s three-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, is 1939’s German Jewish child.” The Huffington Post ran a piece by David Bier a few weeks ago headlined, “What the Holocaust Can Teach Us About the Syrian Refugee Crisis.”
To recap: Iran is an anti-Semitic terrorist regime that has threatened to exterminate Israel, home to over 6 million Jews. The deal struck by the Obama administration, even if followed, paves the way for radicals to amass a nuclear arsenal within 15 years, and in the meantime, gives them the money and space to pose a more dangerous conventional threat. Yet to liberal defenders of the deal, it was somehow beyond the pale to make a comparison to another time in history in which world powers cut a deal with a tyrant who threatened Jews, only to see him go on to kill millions of Jews.
Meanwhile, a number of conservatives have raised concerns about how to properly vet Syrian refugees, concerns that were vindicated when somebody posing as a refugee carried out a massive terrorist attack in a major city of a U.S. ally. And liberals seem to have no qualms about pulling out the Holocaust analogies to deligitimize those concerns.
However infuriating the hypocricy, it helps illuminate a key distinction between liberals and conservatives when it comes to drawing lessons from World War II in general and the Holocaust specifically. Liberals look at the history and find a lesson about hate and intolerance, whereas conservatives see a lesson about the need to act more agressively, and preemptively, in the face of evil.
