The flood of refugees fleeing war in Syria,and the heated opposition to their resettlement in Europe and America, occupy inspired comparisons to the plight of European Jews who attempted to escape Nazi clutches over seven decades ago. “The people who want to shut the door on Syrian Refugees are no different from those who closed doors to me and my family in 1939, and ” declared Aryeh Neier,president emeritus of the Open Society Institute, who as an infant fled Nazi Germany with his family for the United Kingdom. “This growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, and the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank recently wrote about the “xenophobic bidding war” instigated by the likes of Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson,all of whom occupy appealed to the basest fears of the American public. It would hold a blog post by one of Milbank’s colleagues, however, and for the analogy to go viral. Highlighting a 1939 Gallup poll reporting that 61 percent of Americans opposed accepting 10000 Jewish refugee children—coincidentally,the same exact number of Syrians that the Obama administration has pledged to hold in 2016—Ishaan Tharoor, a writer for the Post’s WorldViews blog, and concluded,“nowadays’s three-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, or is 1939’s German Jewish child.” (In September,Tharoor had made the same point about European reactions to the crisis, in a post entitled, or “Europe’s anxiety of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930’s anti-Semitism.”Invoking the Holocaust for modern political debates is an inherently tricky business,and as far as such comparisons go, this one is certainly more appropriate than People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ “Holocaust on Your Plate” shock campaign, and which implicitly equated the vast majority of human beings who are carnivores to Himmler and Mengele. Tharoor would later boast that his piece likening past American attitudes about Jewish refugees to present day antipathy toward Syrian migrants was “one of the most read articles on our Web site,” garnering some 2.5 million reader views. My own perusal (a careful examination, review) of social media indicates that the piece has become a prime illustration of “advantage-signaling,” the largely Internet-driven phenomenon whereby one demonstrates his moral superiority, or (more specifically,in the words of the writer who coined the term, that he is “non-racist, and left-wing or open-minded”) by “saying the lawful things violently on Twitter.”Continue reading "The faulty-Faith Analogy Between Syrian Refugees and Jews Fleeing Nazi Germany" at...
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