When I first saw that President Trump had issued a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that included no mention of the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis, I was actually willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I assumed it was the sort of oversight that can occur in the beginning days of a new administration. It turns out I was being too generous. In fact the Trump administration deliberately left the Jews out of the statement. The White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t mention Jews or anti-Semitism because “despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into…
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Tony Greenstein’s Sleight of Hand
This is a guest post by Paul Bogdanor Not long ago, Fathom published my refutation of Ken Livingstone’s antisemitic guru, Lenni Brenner. Tony Greenstein, a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, has twice jumped to Brenner’s defence. His first reply to me can be read here and my rejoinder here. Greenstein has come back for more with an extremely long-winded blog post here. My second rejoinder to him is now available here. From the introduction: In his latest interminable response to me, he invokes Moshe Menuhin, a regular contributor to the neo-Nazi press in Germany; the “Information Bulletin” of the Soviet-controlled Israeli Communist Party; and a long-defunct journal published by a group expelled from…
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Inappropriate and offensive Nazi comparisons
This is an issue I’ve raised here more than once. It’s a practice with a depressingly long history; among those who have indulged in it are Winston Churchill and even David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin. In the video, Kurt Eichenwald says appropriate analogies to Nazi Germany are Stalin’s Soviet Union and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. I would add North Korea under the Kim dynasty. There may be a handful of others. But that’s about it. Other than that, everyone who makes these comparisons is dishonoring the real victims of the Nazis. Regardless of whether we agree with their politics or not, they need to be called out.
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Armenia: The Betrayal of Truth
Politico reports: President Barack Obama will not use the word “genocide” to describe the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians in his annual statement commemorating the historic atrocity later this month. […] As a candidate in 2008, Obama issued a statement promising to describe the plight of the Armenians as a genocide, but in his previous five statements he has not done so — mainly to avoid a rupture in diplomatic relations with Turkey, a NATO ally and key partner in addressing the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Armenian-American leaders, hopeful that the 100th anniversary and recent support for their view from Pope Francis, were dejected on Tuesday. “This…