Breaking news: Rahm Emanuel is not a Nazi.
You’d think that this would be clear, seeing as Emanuel identifies as Jewish, belongs to an Orthodox synagogue in Chicago, sends his kids to Jewish day school, served Israel in the Gulf War and is the son of an Irgun fighter of the 1940s. This is not to mention that he is a top adviser in a liberal democratic government of the United States, the country that drove the Nazis from power in Europe (with Britain and Russia, of course).
See, all of this is obvious and should not merit our time, were it not for Caroline Glick.
Glick, who serves as the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post and who was once voted Israel’s most influential woman, asserts in a recent blog post that
Emanuel is widely perceived as being a self-hating Jews [sic.] who is determined to prove himself to Obama by sticking it to Israel.
Glick’s accusation of Emanuel as a self-hating Jew, solely because of policy she deems to be anti-Israel, echoes a recent Ha’aretz report that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu called Emanuel and Obama adviser David Axelrod by the same derogatory label.
That label in and of itself is morally reprehensible and unacceptable, not to mention untrue, seeing as both advisers identify publicly as Jewish. Furthermore, that Netanyahu has not come out against the Ha’aretz report is surprising.
But Glick goes one step further in the same blog post. There, she advertises a video wherein a caricature of Emanuel calls himself an anti-Semite, denies his Judaism, his connection to Israel and, worst of all, suggests that he is Obama’s “Kapo,” thereby making Obama out to be Hitler, and both of them to be Nazis. Watch the video here:
Obviously this is ridiculous and I will waste minimal time attacking a video that, as I said above, is offensive, inaccurate, juvenile and immoral. As Glick does know, however, Emanuel is a Jew whether he likes it or not, and that means one thing:
He likely would have died in the Holocaust had he been in Europe at the time.
Not only that, but 6,000,000 other Jews did die in the Holocaust: our ancestors and distant cousins, the leaders of our communities in the old world and the laypeople, the Zionists and the anti-Zionists, the rightists and, yes, Caroline, even the leftists.
To call another Jew a Nazi, then, is despicable and reprehensible. To apply the label of the most anti-Semitic group in history to someone who gave his children a Jewish education cannot and should not be accepted, and Glick should know better if she is indeed as intelligent as her education and various accolades show her to be.
Many people, in the US and around the world, have decided that it is somehow appropriate to compare Obama’s administration to the Third Reich. Like Rep. Barney Frank, I tend to dismiss these ill-founded comparisons, but to hear it from someone who writes a regular column in the Jerusalem Post is a different story.
The above video comes from a website Glick started this year to satirize Israeli media (I won’t link to it here). If her views belongs anywhere it’s on that site; in no way should this woman’s damaging, stupid rhetoric have a place in Israel’s most-read English newspaper and for her to serve as a deputy managing editor there is a disgrace to a news organization that strives for journalistic integrity.
I strongly urge the Jerusalem Post’s leadership, should they read this, to consider whether they want to place on their masthead someone who calls other Jews Nazis. Caroline Glick should not write for the Post, nor should her words have any place in the Israeli political discourse.
