The American Spectator

Presswatch

Nuance and Nazis

By James Taranto from the June 2009 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Israel, Cohen claims, is motivated not by an aversion to being obliterated but merely by a cynical desire “to lock in American support and avoid any disadvantageous change in the Middle Eastern balance of power.”

America should say no, Cohen asserts, because “Israeli hegemony is proving a kind of slavery.” That statement seemed especially ugly, and a Google search showed why. In 1939, Der Stürmer published an editorial by Julius Streicher titled “The Way to Slavery,” which declared that “what one calls democracy today is concealed Jewish domination.”

Of course the Times is not the Stürmer, and Cohen is no Streicher. The latter was actively promoting evil; the former, one must assume, is fatuously trying to explain it away. But Cohen’s faint echo of the rhetoric that led to the Holocaust suggests that more respect for postwar taboos would be good for the Times’s moral hygiene.  

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