51 percent of Germans equate Israelis with Nazis

This shocking news is from the Jerusalem Post, via JihadWatch:

Six decades after the mass extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany, more than 50 percent of Germans believe that Israel’s present-day treatment of the Palestinians is similar to what the Nazis did to the Jews during World War II, a German survey released this weekend shows.

51 percent of respondents said that there is not much of a difference between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians today and what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust, compared to 49% who disagreed with such a comparison, according to the poll carried out by Germany’s University of Bielefeld.

The survey also found that 68 percent of Germans believe that Israel is waging a “war of extermination” against the Palestinians, while some 32% disagreed with such a statement.

JihadWatch explains the prevalence of this amazing belief among Germans as the result of jihadist propaganda. That’s certainly a big part of it, but I think a bigger part of it is liberalism itself. Liberalism teaches modern Westerners that any exertion of authority, any use of force, is the equivalent of Fascism or Nazism (of course there are lots of unprincipled exceptions to this). Modern Westerners see the Israelis, year in, year out, suppressing the Palestinian population, using violence against them. They don’t have to know anything else, they don’t have to know what the Palestinians are doing, they don’t have to know why the Israelis have no choice but to do what they are doing. All they see is the “oppression,” and that is enough.

Seventy years ago, based on Nazi race ideology, the German people delegitimized the Jewish people and waged a demonic campaign to drive them out of existence.

Today, based on liberalism, the German people delegitimize the Jewish state and support the people who are waging a demonic campaign to drive it out of existence.

Are liberalism and Nazism the same, after all?

(See my article, “Liberalism: The Real Cause of Today’s Anti-Semitism.”)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 08, 2004 10:20 PM | Send