Daniel Altman, an adjunct associate professor of economics at New York University, wrote in Foreign Policy that President Trump’s retweeting of what Altman called “anti-Muslim propaganda videos” is “the most un-American thing he has done as president.”
Even worse, wrote Altman, “the videos he shared purportedly portray outrages committed by Muslim migrants in Europe, yet in reality they may be nothing of the sort. And just as Adolf Hitler claimed that the mainstream media’s dismissal of the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion] proved that they were true, the president has repeatedly switched fact for fiction, especially in his denouncements of ‘fake news.’”
After this breathtaking smear and leap of logic, Altman granted: “Despite these parallels, it may still seem like a stretch to link a few retweets to the Holocaust.”
Uh, yeah.
Altman’s argument rests on his claim that the videos Trump retweeted — which all are authentic videos showing Muslims being violent — are analogous to the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Altman writes: “One of the precursors to the Nazi ascendancy was the immense popularity, in the painful aftermath of World War I, of a book purporting to disclose Jews’ plans for global domination: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The book was a forgery — no such plan existed or had ever been published by Jews — but it and similar texts cemented Jews as scapegoats for Europe’s economic and political ills years before the Nazis took power. The analogy to the president and his retweets is striking.”
Actually, the idea that Trump’s retweets have anything to with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is more Leftist hysteria. Leftists are growing ever more deranged in their hatred of President Trump. This claim that Muslims are being victimized as Jews were is not original to Daniel Altman of Foreign Policy; it was already a common Leftist talking point.
Many, many others have made this claim: Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Prince Charles, the notorious non-Muslim Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong, the far-Left Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Leftist media darling Reza Aslan, Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, the deceptive Canada-based Islamic supremacist imam Syed Sohawardy, and Philadelphia chapter head of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations Jacob Bender. Many others have repeated it.
While the idea that Muslims are the new Jews is put forward by the Left, it also has opponents on the Left. In 2014, as part of his ongoing awakening to the nature and reality of the jihad threat, Bill Maher noted: “Jews weren’t oppressing anybody. There weren’t 5,000 militant Jewish groups. They didn’t do a study of treatment of women around the world and find that Jews were at the bottom of it. There weren’t 10 Jewish countries in the world that were putting gay people to death just for being gay.”
Indeed.
Further, neither Trump nor anyone else is calling for or justifying genocide of Muslims, as Hitler did against Jews early in his political career.
No individual or group opposed to Islam is remotely comparable to the National Socialists. Not that facts have ever gotten in the way of a good meme.
Maher isn’t alone on the Left in having pointed out the absurdity of likening opposition to jihad to the lead-up to the Holocaust. The late Christopher Hitchens also refuted this idea when writing a few years ago about the notorious Ground Zero Mosque proposal: “‘Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,’ Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like.”
Have Daniel Altman and Foreign Policy taken leave of their senses? Are they so consumed with hatred for Trump that they will throw any charge at him, no matter how preposterous? The Trump Derangement Syndrome of the Left is becoming so ridiculous that it is often hard to believe that those making these charges are serious. But they are. That’s why they’re not just ridiculous, but dangerous.
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