The other night on Charlie Rose, the host asked the regrettable Richard Perle about Israel. Perle went on to liken Yasir Arafat to Hitler and asked, rhetorically, "would you have diplomacy with Hitler?"
Perle’s comment should be filed with a bunch of other statements by hawks making Arabs out to be Nazis. Menachem Begin used to say that Arafat in Beirut was like Hitler in his bunker. Tom Lantos likened Saddam to Hitler. Begin and Lantos survived the Holocaust, which somewhat excuses their alarmism. But recently I heard Alan Dershowitz speak of the 1967 border of Israel as the "Auschwitz line," and the best Dershowitz can say is that he survived Brooklyn. This sort of rhetoric is extremely confusing. There are plenty of reasons to fault Palestinian tactics and Arab rejectionism without bringing the Holocaust into it.
Though Perle’s comment is also helpful; it reveals the hysterical thinking that led to the Iraq debacle.
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Germany's Third Reich/Hitlerism is always a convenient model to frame a morally 'unbeatable' – though idiotic – argument.
- Hitler's recruited and equipped a huge army to conquer half of Europe. How does Arafat's PLO or Hamas' gunmen compare to that?
Not only is Germany's past but also its post-WWII present a convenient model. 'Look at Germany, we successfully rebuild it democratically after Hitler's dictatorship – we will do the same with Iraq after Saddam.' That's what Rumsfeld said before invading Iraq. A culturally idiotic argument to begin with.
Klaus
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