Nick Kristof’s fallacious history lesson on refugees
Once again, last century’s Jewish refugees are used to plead
for today’s mostly Muslim refugees. It was exactly
a
year ago that the
Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor devoted several
articles to
this
topic and eventually
noted
with great satisfaction that one of these articles “ended up being one of the
most read articles on our Web site.” Now it is the
New York Times’ (NYT)
Nick Kristof who
argues
that “world leaders should reflect on” the failure to help Jews fleeing Nazi
Germany during currently ongoing meetings in New York City about today’s
refugee crisis. As Kristof grimly notes: “
Without greater political will, this week’s meetings may be remembered as
no better than the 1938 Evian Conference [where
delegates from 32 countries made do with expressing sympathy for the plight of
Jews without offering refuge]
, and
history will be unforgiving.” Just a few weeks ago, Kristof declared “Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl.”
Given Kristof’s attempts to revive this fallacious history
lesson, it is useful to recall some of the responses to last year’s debate,
most notably James Kirchick’s superb
Tablet piece
on “The Bad-Faith Analogy Between Syrian Refugees and Jews Fleeing Nazi Germany.”
While the comparison has also been embraced by some
Holocaust survivors and their descendants as well as some
Jewish
leaders, anti-Israel activists were quick to do a really good job exposing the
hypocrisy that helped this “history lesson” go viral. As I noted in a related
blog
post last year, I was actually alerted to the popularity of the comparison
while monitoring the Twitter activity of notorious Israel-haters like Ali
Abunimah and Max Blumenthal. Back then I argued:
“So when there is a debate about
how to respond to the hundreds of thousands –
projected
soon to become millions – of mostly Muslim refugees and migrants fleeing war
and poverty in their own countries, Abunimah and Blumenthal discover their
sympathies for the Jewish refugees desperate to flee the Nazis in the 1930s and
1940s. The problem with this is that both Abunimah and Blumenthal are otherwise
often busy promoting the 21st century version of the Nazi slogan ‘The Jews are
our misfortune,’ which is: ‘The Jewish state is our misfortune.’
Obviously, if Israel had been
established just ten years earlier, many of the Jews trying in vain to find
refuge from the Nazis would have had a place to go to.”
This last point is still conveniently ignored by most of the
people who are eager to transform the plight of Jews desperate to flee the
Nazis into a “history lesson” that is useful for current political debates. But
if one insists on using the fate of last century’s unfortunate Jewish refugees
for the benefit of today’s refugees, the groups with the best claim would
obviously be the Middle Eastern minorities who are fleeing murderous
persecution by Muslim groups and states – notably the Yazidis as well as Middle
Eastern Christians and Kurds.
Of course, such a distinction would be condemned as anti-Muslim
bigotry, despite the fact that the Muslim refugees of today – very different
from the Jewish refugees of last century – could seek refuge in many Muslim
countries. Moreover, as I’ve noted previously, “the Muslim countries that are
members of the
Organisation
of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) boast of having formed ‘the second largest
inter-governmental organization after the United Nations’ with a ‘membership of
57 states spread over four continents.’ Supposedly, the OIC ‘is the collective
voice of the Muslim world’ and is dedicated to ‘ensuring to safeguard and
protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting
international peace and harmony among various people of the world.’” Surely the
OIC can be counted on to prevent Kristof’s nightmare scenario that “this week’s
meetings may be remembered as no better than the 1938 Evian Conference”? I have
no doubt that if there had been 57 Jewish states spread over four continents in
1938, every single Jew who fled the Nazis would have found refuge – including
Anne Frank and her family.
Furthermore, notwithstanding the disdain of liberals like
Kristof, not all people who oppose Muslim immigration are bigots. There is the
inconvenient fact that most acts of terrorism in western countries are
committed by Muslims, and as anyone who follows the news will know,
particularly European countries are facing serious problems with the
integration of Muslims. There are plenty of problems
in France, and a
British
study published last spring showed “that large numbers of Muslims don’t
want to integrate, that their views aren’t remotely enlightened, and that more
than a few of them sympathise with terrorism.” There is also a “new era of
anti-Semitic violence in Europe,” which, as Jeffrey Goldberg
put
it, is “different from previous ones” because “traditional Western patterns
of anti-Semitic thought have now merged with a potent strain of Muslim
Judeophobia. Violence against Jews in Western Europe today, according to those
who track it, appears to come mainly from Muslims.”
Perhaps western liberals who scold their fellow citizens for
bigotry against Muslim refugees and migrants would be able to make their case
more effectively if they acknowledged that westerners have no monopoly on
bigotry – indeed, there are many indications that this is one of the few areas
where the Muslim world is well ahead.
A Pew
survey
published in 2004 found “that Christians get much lower ratings in
predominantly Muslim countries than do Muslims in mostly Christian countries.
Majorities in Morocco (73%), Pakistan (62%) and Turkey (52%) express negative
views of Christians.” In 2011, another Pew
survey
showed similar results:
“Muslims in the predominantly
Muslim countries surveyed are more likely to associate negative characteristics
with Westerners than non-Muslims are to associate them with Muslims. For
example, nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Jordanian Muslims use at least three of the
six negative adjectives* tested to describe people in Western countries, as do
majorities in Egypt (81%), Turkey (73%), the Palestinian territories (71%),
Pakistan (67%) and Indonesia (63%); only in Lebanon is this not the case. In
contrast, Spain is the only Western country surveyed where a majority (60%) of
non-Muslims associate three or more negative characteristics with Muslims. At
least three-in-ten non-Muslims in Britain (39%), the U.S. (35%) and France
(30%) do not attribute any of the six negative characteristics tested to
Muslims.”
* i.e. violent, greedy, fanatical,
selfish, immoral, arrogant
Then there are the
shocking
sermons by preachers seething with hatred against the “Other” – Jews of
course, but also Christians and the West in general – that can be heard fairly
regularly at the Al-Aqsa mosque, which is supposedly Islam’s third-holiest
site. Is it even imaginable that anything remotely comparable could be preached
over and over again in a major church or cathedral in the West?
Two years ago Kristof
acknowledged
in a column that “Anti-Semitism runs deep in some Muslim countries today” – but
there was of course a “but”: “for most of history, Muslims were more tolerant
of Jews than Christians were.” Kristof also worried plenty about stoking anti-Muslim
bigotry with this column and tried last year to make the case that, as one
critic
put it, “the Bible is full of bad stuff while the Qur’an has some good stuff.”
Given Kristof’s concerns about “political correctness,” one
might have hoped that he would have been more hesitant to exploit the plight of
last century’s Jewish refugees for the benefit of today’s refugees. To be sure,
the reports and images from the violence and war in the Muslim Middle East are
heartbreaking. But there are many ways to plead for the victims of the region’s
carnage without invoking the cruel indifference that was shown to the Jews
trying to flee the Nazis. After all, if “Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl,”
are the regimes and groups that make her “Anne Frank” – Assad, Hezbollah, Iran,
Russia and the assorted Islamists fighting in Syria and elsewhere – the Nazis? I’m
pretty sure that is a comparison Kristof wouldn’t like at all.
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Tuesday, September 20, 2016
