James Lileks writes:
I recommend the entire article.
ISTM that the Arabs resemble Nazis a* lot* more than thte Israeli settlers do.
The article:
Saddam, Saddam, Saddam.
December:
Arabs.
Hmmm. Nope. While I suppose I can see a comparison of Saddam to Hitler, nothing in what you quoted suggests a comparison of arabs to Nazis.
With all respect, December, it looks like you have a line out and are witing for bites. And I think you know it.
December uses ISTM, which I would understand as “it seems to me” (IAGSONCA*)
So this is an expression of opinion, not an attempt at debate. Send it to IMHO? the Pit?
In an effort to rescue it, how, December do you derive a conclusion about Arabs in general and their relative similarity to Nazis from this article? In what way does it suggest anything about the political or ethnic attitudes of Arabs as a group? And where is there any reference to Israel?
Or is it a handy way to accuse the Liberally Slanted Media[sup]TM[/sup] of pro-Arab bias?
[sub]* I am getting sick of newly coined acronyms[/sub]
Oh boy!! Do I get to say it now? TROLL ALERT !! TROLL ALERT !!
Is Saddam even an Arab?
This title was based on the GD thread So, is the West Bank settler/Nazi comparison unfair?, which offended me.
Did you folks have the same comments about that thread? If not, why not?
I will admit that the OP focused on Saddam. However, there are other Middle Eastern Arabs and nations who [ul][]Kill large numbers of Israeli civilians []Preach anti-semitism and publish anti-Semitic material[]Financially support the aforementioned activities []Murder large numbers of their own citizens.[/ul] So, Iraq is not the only Arab country that brings to mind Godwin’s Law.
December:
The thread you mentioned highly offended me also. Thats why I have been posting in that thread. If you check my last remark I mentioned the fact that closer parallels could be drawn between the PLO/PA to the Nazis than the Israelis to the Nazis. I’ll tell you what tommow I will bring a book with me to work and take some quotes directly from it (it is a documentary history of the middle east).
As a side note Yassir Arafat’s uncle was the mufti of Jerusalem durring WWII (if memory serves me correctly) he met with Hitler and tried to convince Hitler to implement the final solution in the middle east. That part I am certain of.
I think the similarities are plain to see.
So the rules of the Board can be deliberately violated because you are offended?
If you were offended, start a Pit thread or respond in the thread itself. Don’t deliberately troll in response. In other words, grow up. And, of course, if you had actually read the fricking thread, the comparison in that thread title has already been shot down, and the remaining debate is on whether Kach-type groups are validly compared to Nazism.
Sua
December is not a troll.
The difference between that thread and this thread, December, is that in that thread, the OP draws a thoughtful and fairly logical, if oversimplified, parallel between West Bank settlers and the Nazis.
In this thread here, you quote a columnist who is talking about Saddam Hussein and his genocide against the Kurds, and you somehow extrapolate that to “Arabs” in your one-sentence OP, and then in your subsequent post, just before mine, you make it clear that you’re not talking about “Arabs”, but about “Palestinians”.
And then you make the following remarkable statement:
Like who, exactly? Cite?
And in what way, exactly, are you comparing them to the Nazis?
For example, which Arab nation, exactly, is busy killing large numbers of Israeli civilians, besides the Palestinians (who aren’t a “nation” anyway, but that’s beside the point)?
In what way does the various Arab nations’ anti-Semitism put them on a level with the Nazis?
In what way does the various Arab groups’ support of Hamas put them on a level with the Nazis?
Besides Saddam, who else in the Arab world is busy murdering large numbers of their own citizens?
Then I will apologize to December. I had not been paying attention to the other thread at all, and took this one as vastly over-the-top. While I do not agree with most of December’s stated views, I regard him as an opinionated poster with some talent at arguing a contrarian view with relative fairness, not as a brainless agitator or anything similar.
I agree that a Pit rant would have been more appropriate than the OP here as the just response to it. However, my response at least was inappropriate in view of December’s intent to produce gander-sauce to go with the other thread.
December, When I first joined this board over at Best Boards, there was a race thread titled “Black people can run really really fast but they are stupid” It offended me. So I started a thread titled “White people are slow but they sure are smart”. Alot of people piled on and called me names like “troll”. The mods closed the thread. The same goes here only you are a regular poster who has respect of others here. You are granted leeway not on the content of your thread but on your status on the board. That doesn’t make your thread any less trollish. Don’t use the respect given you to bend the rules in your favor. It is not becoming and undermines the integrity of this board.
Not quite. That OP (whose logic we’ll set aside for the moment) made a parallel with an unstated small number of West Bank settlers. I don’t know how many settlers have allegedly murderred or mistreated Arabs, but the OP didn’t bother to distinguish any sub-sets. It addressed “Settlers” just as I addressed “Arabs.”
a. Palestinians and various terrorist groups
b. Saudi Arabia, Palestinian Authority. I’ve seen other examples as well.
c. Certain Saudi Arabians, Iraq, Iran
d. Moammar Khadafy in Libya
At the moment, just the Palestinians and various terrorist organizations supported by various Arab groups, suich as Hamas and Hizbullah. Within recent memory, several Arab nations have made unprovoked wars on Israel.
I don’t have the cite at the moment, but I have read that one nation was spreading actual Nazi anti-semitic material.
To be clear, I don’t really think that anyone today is really like the Nazis, who were uniquely evil. I am really pissed by the other thread and by those who take it seriously.
It’s not too terribly hard to draw comparisons between the Palestinians and the Nazis. They were after all loosely allied in World War II. I use the term “loosely” only because it has never been easy to establish who exactly leads the Palestinians, even today. The preeminent Palestinan leader of the time was without question a Nazi supporter.
Here’s a picture of Yassir Arafat’s purported uncle (Arafat keeps his lineage secret), visiting with someone closely associated with Nazi Germany:
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/muftihit.html
Haj Amin al-Husseini was the nominal leader of the Palestinians in the 1930s. He led the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 in Palestine, then fled to Iraq, where he helped orchestrate a pro-Nazi coup, and later fled to Nazi Germany, where he helped to spread pro-Nazi propaganda among the Arab nations, and where he was also accused of recruiting the Hanjar Troopers, an SS unit composed of Bosnians which was tasked with exterminating Jews and Serbians in Yugoslavia.
Another more abstract comparison may be drawn between the Golan Heights and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Hitler came just short of war in demanding that the Sudeten Germans be repatriated to Nazi Germany. More importantly, the Sudeten highlands were the only natural geographical boundary which separated Germany from Czechoslovakia (which is why they were taken away from Germany to begin with). A few months after Hitler had the Sudetenland, he rolled his tanks through the remainder of Czechoslovakia in a matter of hours and annexed the entire country.
The Israelis invested the Golan Heights in 1967, after the Syrians had used the mountain range as a springboard for invasion–twice. The current plan endorsed by the Arab League requires an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, once again giving the Syrians the Golan Heights and the strategic initiative in any future invasion plans.
The Arab nations are preaching various viirulently Anti-Semitic lies. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is apparently selling very well in the Arab world. A large minority of Arabs believe that Israel was behind the September 11 attacks, and the disgusting lie that Jews were alerted and stayed home from the WTC on Sept 11. is widely believed in the Arab world.
A number of Arab countries were allied with the Axis in WWII.
The reason Israel took the Golan Heights in the first place is because Syrian troops used to snipe at Israeli citizens going about their peaceful business working on Kibbutzes. Men, women, and children were shot and killed from the Golan for no reason other than that Syria hates Israelis. When Israeli shot back against the snipers, Syria used this as an excuse to attempt a full-scale attack from the Golan. Israel pushed them back and held the territory. Israel has offered to give the Golan Heights back on several occasions as long as they were allowed to maintain a radar station there to prevent more Syrian suprise attacks - Syria refused. Israel also offered to turn the Golan Heights into a demilitarized zone - Syria refused. Assad of Syria as of yesterday has called for the Arab world to step up support for Hamas and Hizbollah “until the end”. The end, in Syria’s twisted version of the future, occurs when the last Israeli is dead or has fled the Middle East. In short, Holocaust II.
Hamas and Hizbollah receive financial, military, and strategic support from a number of Arab nations.
There are no Arab democracies.
There is no freedom of the press or freedom of association or many other political freedoms in the Arab world.
There are many, many parallels you can draw between the Arab world and the Nazis. Irrational belief in conspiracies, militaristic, agressive governments, virulent anti-semitism… Thank god that the Arab world is rather ineffective at industrializing and fighting wars, because if they were powerful enough they would have destroyed Israel by now and would be agressively attacking others, unless of course they turned on each other and destroyed themselves first.
Yes, of course the Arab/Nazi comparison is unfair. Arabs are an ethic group; the Nazis were a political organization. You might compare Al-Qaeda, or the P.L.O., or certain Middle Eastern goverments to Nazis*, and you might compare Arabs to WWII-era Germans, but comparing Arabs to Nazis is ridiculous and offensive.
You wouldn’t equate Germans as a group with Naziism, would you? Then don’t equate Saddam’s evil plans or the Taliban’s brand of psycho-Islam with Arabs as a group. Thank you.
- I am not endorsing any of these comparisons myself, mind you, just saying any of them would make more sense than comparing Arabs in general to Nazis.
Sam Stone-
Hi, have you met Turkey?
No? Here, I’ll hit the highlights for you:
“Government: Democratic, secular, and parliamentary…”
"Articles 28 and 67 of the 1982 constitution stipulate that the individual is entitled to privacy and to freedom of thought and communication, travel, and association; that the physical integrity of the individual must not be violated; that torture and forced labor are prohibited; that all persons have access to the courts and are assumed innocent until proven guilty; that all Turkish citizens over twenty years of age have the right to vote in elections and to take part in referenda; and that the news media are free and not liable to censorship, except by a court order when national security or the “indivisible integrity of the state” are threatened. "
Please consider getting your facts straight before making sweeping generalizations.
shrug
I tend to agree with **C K Dexter Haven’s ** main comment in the trigger thread for this one. These blithe comparisons of various group to Nazis isn’t particularly helpful and tend to dilute the horror of Nazi Germany, which still stands head and shoulders above all other evil regimes ( only the Khmer Rouge come close in my book ).
Kach and Islamic Jihad may be utterly loathsome, but I prefer the strict definition of Nazi, as being, well, a Nazi.
C’mon now Sam, that really is bordering on racism. You’re better than that. I wouldn’t deny any of your comparisons, but the current situation in the Arab world is a result of historical trends and quirks, not some intrinsic bloodlust and lack of capacity. If the world was a different place, the world would be a different place - Don’t try to extrapolate current situations to alternative universes 
.
king of spain: Well, as I just mentioned elsewhere, Turkey isn’t Arab . But I think your point is well-taken otherwise.
- Tamerlane
I kind of suspected that while writing the post, but then I figured that such technicalities usually don’t matter much to the people who post the kind of thing Sam just did, so I might as well go ahead. Thanks for the clarification.
Okay, you’re right. I have to qualify my statements. First of all, when speaking of “The Arab world”, I am not talking about the PEOPLE. There’s nothing about being an Arab that means you are predisposed to believing anything in particular.
King of Spain: Please consider getting YOUR facts straight. Turkey isn’t Arab. Turkey is a muslim state. And yes, it is relatively free and is friendly to the west. It’s been a member of NATO for a long time. Most decidedly, muslim does not equal Arab. Afghanistan and Iran are also not Arab.
The Arab nations are: : Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
The chief problem in the Arab world, as I see it, has nothing to do with being ‘Arab’. Instead, the problem is that the leaders of those countries are generally not much more than tribal chieftans and warlords, who occupy positions of elevated status for little reason other than they happen to be lucky enough to be sitting on a giant reservoir of oil. But the mindsets of the leaders of those countries are still wrapped around territorialism and tribalism. Israelis are ‘outsiders’, and their occupation of Israel is seen as an intrusion on Arab territory. And by ‘occupation’ I don’t mean the occupied territories, but all of Israel itself. The probem is exacerbated by the fact that the region is thick with ancient rivalries and conflicts which go back thousands of years and have religious as well as territorial causes.
The Arab countries have a history of attacking each other as well as Israel. Not too long ago we had to set up troops in Saudi Arabia to protect it from a fellow Arab country, and Kuwait was invaded. Hence my comment ‘unless they attack each other’.
The Arab people, unfortunately, have become more militant and extremist, because the Arab governments have been using the Jews in Israel as scapegoats to mask their own failings and oppression of their own people. Another parallel with the Nazis, btw. The German people were whipped into a frenzy of hatred and anti-semitism not because there is anything inherent in Germans that should make them hate Jews, but because oppressive regimes with good propaganda have a startling ability to twist the minds of the people, especially when those people are suffering. The Soviets did the same thing, and so did the Japanese government.
It should be pointed out that not all Arab nations are the same. Qatar and Bahrain are relatively strong allies of the U.S., and have divorced themselves from much of the violence. Egypt has maintained an uneasy peace with Israel. Jordan is probably the most moderate of these nations, and has normalized relations with Israel that are solid enough that tourists move back and forth between the two countries.
But unfortunately, the ‘big’ Arab states (Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq) that surround Israel are still calling for its destruction, and it’s these states primarily that my comments apply to.
Sam, I thought from the tone of your last post that you were conflating Arab and Muslim, but I was clearly on crack, so my apologies.
I’m still going to ask if you really stand by your assertion that no democracy or freedom of press or association exists in the Arab world. After a brief Google search to ensure that I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself again I found several of those nations listed as constitutional democracies with universal suffrage and the right to free speech, press, association, etc. guaranteed - and while I don’t doubt that in practice all those countries are quite restrictive by our standards, it still seems like saying that no democracy or freedom of association exists in the Arab world is an awfully broad generalization.
>> Turkey isn’t Arab
It doesn’t have a political system which guarantees individual rights and freedoms either. The EU has told Turkey repeatedly that if they want to join the EU they have a long way to go in establishing those freedoms. Their treatment of the Kurds is appalling.