Monday, May 24, 2010

There must be 2 of them

At the all-anger-all-the-time blog of Commentary Magazine, Jennifer Rubin chastises Newt Gingrich --

Had those individuals [Rand Paul and Richard Blumenthal] not been dominating the headlines, more attention would have been paid to Gingrich’s own comments, comparing liberal Democrats to the Nazis:

“In the 20th Century, America fought and defeated Nazism, fascism, imperialism and communism — four existential threats to our survival,” he wrote. “In this century, America is facing two different kinds of threats, though no less grave.”

The first threat the Gingrich listed was “non-state terrorist networks to kill Americans.”

“But even more disturbing than the threats from foreign terrorists is a second threat that is right here at home,” he wrote. “It is an ideology so fundamentally at odds with historic American values that it threatens to undo the cultural ethics that have made our country great. I call it ‘secular-socialism.’”

Yikes. No, Obamaism isn’t worse than the ideology of jihadist murderers. And the Nazi analogy shouldn’t be bandied about.


In a separate post, Jennifer Rubin, upset at the accounts offered by rabbi who visited the White House to discuss US policy towards Israel --

And by not directly and strongly taking on the president, they are, in fact, enabling the president’s anti-Israel stance. It is, come to think of it, more than an embarrassment; it is an egregious misuse of their status and it is every bit as dangerous as the quietude of American Jews in the 1930s.

The rule seems to be that Nazi analogies are only allowed when the topic is Israel.

Incidentally, there's an apparent subtext to the rage at the moderate rabbi, which is provided by Peter Beinart's damning analysis of the rift between American Jewish liberalism and Zionism. Despite being the object of enormous discussion, Beinart's article has yet to be mentioned in the Israel-obsessed Commentary magazine.

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