Wednesday, April 15, 2009
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Philip Klein: The Case Against Demjanjuk and Buchanan - '... It's bad enough that Buchanan is rising to defend Demjanjuk, but his column is an example of classic Jew-baiting. He attempts to paint contemporary Jews as hypocrites by referring to Demjanjuk as an "American Dreyfus," a reference to the to the high-profile case of anti-Semitism and injustice. This is the typical, "see, Jews aren't victims, they're persecutors," tactic routinely employed by anti-Semites. Then Buchanan concluded his column by comparing Demjanjuk to Jesus Christ, and invoking the old anti-Semitic smear of Jews as "Christ killers."...'
Wow, that is vile, and particularly so. Given the evidence piled up in the 2002 ruling (here), Buchanan's Dreyfus comparison alone is repulsive, much less his invocation of the Christ-killer theme, which is beyond repulsive. Even if Buchanan genuinely does believe Demjanjuk to be innocent, the amount of contrary evidence mitigates, and decisively, against any Dreyfus comparison, and of course the Christ-killer comparison is beyond the pale in any and all cases.
Patrick Buchanan is deserving of being shunned in no uncertain terms. I don't see how anything less than that can be thought of as sound.
An historical sidenote: Perusing the evidence in the 2002 ruling, it appears Demjanjuk was at the Flossenburg concentration camp at very nearly if not the exact same time D. Bonhoeffer was transferred to that camp and executed.