Salon justifies comparing Israel to Nazi Germany

Salon has an article attacking the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, written by Doug Neiss, a Jewish retired business writer and editor.

The entire article is off the wall, but let's concentrate on the part where he claims that comparing Israel to Nazis is not antisemitic - in fact, it is justified.

It is clear to pretty much anyone why such a comparison is not just odious but antisemitic. The people who equate Israel to Nazi Germany are not trying to illuminate the conflict - they are delighting in the lie that Jews are acting like their murderers. They would never compare Syrians or the Taliban to Nazis: only Israel, and that is only because Israel is the Jewish state. It is a deliberate assault on the Jewish psyche. It is meant only to cause pain to Jews. It is by definition antisemitic. 

It is bad enough that Neiss is oblivious to the obvious. Yet Neiss is worse - he is so proudly ignorant of both Israel and Nazi Germany that he actually believes that such a comparison is justified.

Because Jews were the principal victims of Hitler's regime — although not the only ones — Israel seeks, in our name, exemption from any and all criticism that likens Israeli actions or policies to those of the Nazis, regardless of any actual similarities. 

Excuse my French, but what the fuck are the similarities? Is Israel gassing millions of Palestinians to death? Is it herding them into slave labor camps? Is it putting them in cattle cars? Is it calling for the Final Solution to the Palestinians? Because when you compare Israel to Nazi Germany, you are saying that Israel is guilty of planned, industrialized genocide. 

This is like saying there can only ever be one genocide, the Holocaust, and that no other mass murder inflicted by one group of people on another can claim that distinction. Yet if the Holocaust has had value as a cautionary example, it is because it has helped sensitize the world to genocide and ethnic cleansing. 

This is thoroughly offensive on two levels.

One is that even Holocaust scholars will make careful comparisons between the Holocaust and other genocides. The Armenian genocide, the genocide in Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs in China today - they all have echoes from Nazi Germany. No one calls such comparisons antisemitic.

The other issue is that Neiss is indeed saying that Israel is guilty of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Otherwise his argument makes no sense.  Good to know that Salon publishes writings from people who are ignorant of both current events and basic history. 

In essence, Israel claims a right to persecute the Palestinian people free from any censure or criticism, based on the historical identity of Jews as a persecuted people, whose persecution culminated in the enormous historical crime of the Holocaust. Jews are the eternal victims, the Persecuted, and no other people can claim a share in the title, especially not in terms of a claim made against the Jewish state itself. 

Neiss is now, literally, echoing neo-Nazis in his zeal to compare Israel to Nazis.

Here is  an article is from the neo-Nazi Vanguard News. See if you can find any rhetorical daylight between Neiss and neo-Nazis.

Both Neiss and Vanguard say that Jews regard themselves as "eternal victims" who use that status to shield themselves from the consequences of their heinous crimes. 

Salon found a Jew to call Jews Nazis by using Nazi rhetoric. 

You can't make this stuff up.

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