Nazi Nonsense Redux
Recently, sensationalist newspapers and all manner of lefties were calling the new Pope a Nazi. This next example is far worse:
After reading an account of supposed "abuse" in Guantanamo Bay, including (gasp!) turning off air conditioners and playing loud rap music, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, said on the Senate floor: "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have happened by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."
That's right, a US Senator compared US military personel to Nazis and Soviet commisars. These comments are extremely offensive to our military, to the millions of people who were murdered by the Nazis and Soviets, and to the few survivors.
In exposing the absurdity of Amnesty International's similar claim that "Gitmo = Gulag" the National Review editors wrote the following:
"[Amnesty International's] political neutrality long ago morphed into Third Worldism and anti-Western agitprop. Quite typically, Irene Khan, the present secretary general, calls Guantanamo 'the Gulag of our times,' and William Schulz, the organization’s U.S. director, echoes her. Twenty-five million or so were deported in cattle trains to the real Gulag. They went there to die, as Solzhenitsyn explains on the very first page of his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, and die they did, also in the millions, from frost, starvation, disease, forced labor in a mine or forest, a bullet from a guard. The corpses couldn’t be buried in the permafrost. Another survivor, Evgenia Ginzburg, came upon a sleigh laden with cuts of human flesh. Any of that going on in Guantanamo, with its three squares a day and prayer rugs? Is the American KGB busy filling quotas of victims? Apparatchiks like Khan and Schulz are not ignorant slanderers but knowing exploiters of the innocent dead in a real atrocity, and that is hard to forgive."
The same can be said of Durbin. And more. Durbin's position as a Senator gives more credence to these absurd accusations which, like Hanoi Jane's nonsensical babbling, are now being used by our very enemies to hurt us.
Mark Steyn excortiates Durbin: Just for the record, some 15 million to 30 million Soviets died in the gulag; some 6 million Jews died in the Nazi camps; some 2 million Cambodians -- one third of the population -- died in the killing fields. Nobody's died in Gitmo, not even from having Christina Aguilera played to them excessively loudly. The comparison is deranged... One measure of a civilized society is that words mean something: "Soviet" and "Nazi" and "Pol Pot" cannot equate to Guantanamo unless you've become utterly unmoored from reality. Spot the odd one out: 1) mass starvation; 2) gas chambers; 3) mountains of skulls; 4) lousy infidel pop music turned up to full volume. One of these is not the same as the others, and Durbin doesn't have the excuse that he's some airhead celeb or an Ivy League professor. He's the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Don't they have an insanity clause?
(On a side note, Byron York notes that the New York Times is shielding Durbin from his own comments.)
In closing on this subject, I turn to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart to lambast the absurdity of tarring your opponents with Hitler references.
After reading an account of supposed "abuse" in Guantanamo Bay, including (gasp!) turning off air conditioners and playing loud rap music, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, said on the Senate floor: "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have happened by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."
That's right, a US Senator compared US military personel to Nazis and Soviet commisars. These comments are extremely offensive to our military, to the millions of people who were murdered by the Nazis and Soviets, and to the few survivors.
In exposing the absurdity of Amnesty International's similar claim that "Gitmo = Gulag" the National Review editors wrote the following:
"[Amnesty International's] political neutrality long ago morphed into Third Worldism and anti-Western agitprop. Quite typically, Irene Khan, the present secretary general, calls Guantanamo 'the Gulag of our times,' and William Schulz, the organization’s U.S. director, echoes her. Twenty-five million or so were deported in cattle trains to the real Gulag. They went there to die, as Solzhenitsyn explains on the very first page of his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, and die they did, also in the millions, from frost, starvation, disease, forced labor in a mine or forest, a bullet from a guard. The corpses couldn’t be buried in the permafrost. Another survivor, Evgenia Ginzburg, came upon a sleigh laden with cuts of human flesh. Any of that going on in Guantanamo, with its three squares a day and prayer rugs? Is the American KGB busy filling quotas of victims? Apparatchiks like Khan and Schulz are not ignorant slanderers but knowing exploiters of the innocent dead in a real atrocity, and that is hard to forgive."
The same can be said of Durbin. And more. Durbin's position as a Senator gives more credence to these absurd accusations which, like Hanoi Jane's nonsensical babbling, are now being used by our very enemies to hurt us.
Mark Steyn excortiates Durbin: Just for the record, some 15 million to 30 million Soviets died in the gulag; some 6 million Jews died in the Nazi camps; some 2 million Cambodians -- one third of the population -- died in the killing fields. Nobody's died in Gitmo, not even from having Christina Aguilera played to them excessively loudly. The comparison is deranged... One measure of a civilized society is that words mean something: "Soviet" and "Nazi" and "Pol Pot" cannot equate to Guantanamo unless you've become utterly unmoored from reality. Spot the odd one out: 1) mass starvation; 2) gas chambers; 3) mountains of skulls; 4) lousy infidel pop music turned up to full volume. One of these is not the same as the others, and Durbin doesn't have the excuse that he's some airhead celeb or an Ivy League professor. He's the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Don't they have an insanity clause?
(On a side note, Byron York notes that the New York Times is shielding Durbin from his own comments.)
In closing on this subject, I turn to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart to lambast the absurdity of tarring your opponents with Hitler references.