This shouldn’t need to be said, but ISIS fighters are not equivalent in moral plight to German Jews between 1933-1945.
Sadly, it’s a relevant point. Because as my colleague Daniel Jativa reports, Germany’s Anne Frank Education Center has just made that equivalence. Lamenting that Germany might withdraw citizenship from Germans who have joined the Islamic State, the center sent out a number of idiotic tweets. These included the attempted comparison that “As of November 1941, [Jews] automatically lost their citizenship when they the crossed the borders of the Reich regardless of whether [they had] voluntarily emigrated or [had been] deported.” ISIS deserves better, the Center concluded, because “In democracies, deprivation of citizenship is a means of depriving the sovereign, the citizen, of the opportunity to participate.”
I’m sorry, this is what Ricky Gervais would refer to as absolute twaddle. Which is to say, it is total bull excrement. Under the Nazis, German Jews were denied basic human rights on the basis of their religious or cultural identity. German ISIS fighters would be denied their citizenship due to their war against their own democratic state. For the comparison to work here, instead of being innocent victims of a xenophobic annihilation campaign, German Jews would have to have waged a terrorist campaign against a peaceful democratic Nazi Germany that treated them fairly. The center’s comparison is thus an absurd contradiction in terms.
Yet, the false equivalency also speaks to something else: a failure to grasp ISIS’ nature. ISIS isn’t just any old terrorist group, it is an incarnation of an idea of post-nation state governance. It represents the idea, put simply, that individual identity and basic allegiance to a nation state is anathema to true moral order. That is why ISIS declared its Caliphate and then established institutions to govern it. And that is why the group used citizens of states such as Germany to project violence into western Europe. And why those citizens proudly serve that infiltration agenda designed for murder. These ISIS fighters aren’t simply traitors, they are enemies of statehood itself.
Had the U.S. and British intelligence services not been so effective in disrupting ISIS external attacks, we would have seen many more European incidents in the vein of the November 2015 Paris attacks. Considering that those incidents would have involved individuals the Anne Frank Education Center is now comparing to Jewish refugees, I have only one response: Shut up.
