Who Are The Real Nazis?

In his Los Angeles Times column (making left coast leftwing heads explode since 2005!) Jonah Goldberg looks at the moral inversion of the Middle East:

A sick mixture of Holocaust envy and Holocaust denial is the defining spirit of Hamas. Indeed, Holocaust denial passes for a scholarly pursuit not just in Gaza but throughout much of the Arab and Muslim world.

The head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, literally earned a doctorate in it. His doctoral thesis became the book, “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” in which he denounces “the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that 6 million Jews were killed.” In Hamas’ eyes, Abbas is an incorrigible moderate.

It’s Palestinian Islamists who have ideological and political ties to Nazism stretching back to the days of “Hitler’s Mufti,” Haj Amin Husseini, a happy warrior for the Nazi cause.

So why the obsession with casting the Israelis as the new Hitlerites? One answer is surely that critics know such charges are painful to a country largely born of the Holocaust and marked by its scars. It also grabs attention, galvanizes radicals, vents legitimate frustrations and anger and helps demonize the enemy and, hence, justify the deliberate murder of “Zionists everywhere,” as Hamas often declares in its communiques.

But I think, deep down, the desire to cast the Israelis as Nazis is fueled by the haters’ need to see their own hatreds and ambitions mirrored in their enemy’s actions. Hamas has an avowedly Hitlerite agenda. The only way to make such an agenda defensible is to convince yourself and others that the Israelis deserve it. Hence, Hamas and its allies insist that when they aim rockets at grade schools and playgrounds, they are resisting the “new Nazis.” It brings to mind Huey Long’s reported prophecy that if fascism ever came to America, it would be called anti-fascism. Well, with Hamas, Hitlerism comes to the Middle East wearing the mask of anti-Hitlerism.

Meanwhile, over at Pajamas HQ, Ron Rosenbaum explores “Some Differences Between Hamas and the Nazi Party.”