https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/lie-israelis-being-new-nazis-part-ii-richard-l-cravatts/
Editor’s note: Below is Part 2 in this author’s 2-Part Series on ‘Lies in the Cognitive War Against Israel’. See Part 1: HERE.]
When SJP activists and their invited speakers demonstrate against Israel, their speech and literature is peppered with allegations about Israel’s alleged “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, echoing comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”
The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity, at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.
What is the purpose of this grotesque campaign to transmogrify the Jewish state into the Third Reich? The insidious answer is that once Israel has been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state has been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist—exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought.
What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the ‘long-suffering Palestinians’. Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism—clear examples of both Holocaust minimization and inversion and both contemporary versions of anti-Semitic thought and expression.
That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”
At Columbia University’s department of Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, as another example, never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Jewish state as a racist, colonial enterprise, a moral stain on the world without any semblance of legitimacy, and Israelis, as he never tires of mentioning, have become the new Nazis and the Palestinians the new Jews. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” he wrote after Operation Cast Lead when Israel was defending itself against some relentless rockets attacks from Gaza into civilian neighborhoods, “world powers are cheering on . . , and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.”
