Normally, when George F. Will says something, you can be
certain it is rooted in empirical facts. You may agree with him or you may
disagree, but you do so only insofar as his expressed opinions are concerned.
This time, however, George Will departed from the norm. In
his attempt to compare the apparent similarities and differences between Hitler
and Iran , he remained as
empirical as he could be when describing Hitler, but not when he described Iran . In fact, how
could he even compare the single person that is Hitler with the nation of Iran that is
made of eighty million people – each different from the other as their finger
prints?
That question comes to mind when you read his syndicated
column, published in the Washington Post under the title: “Does Iran 's
anti-Semitism run too deep for deterrence?” It ran on October 30, 2015. What
the author does in this piece is adopt the profile of Hitler as portrayed by
the historian Timothy Snyder, and compares it with a profile of the nation of Iran that's an
abstract absurdity painted by the Jewish propaganda machine.
To be fair to George Will, it must be said that he does not
make a definitive comparison between the two. In fact, he ends his piece with a
conditional hypothesis that remains to be proved or disproved. It is this: “An
anti-Semitic regime can be impervious to the logic of deterrence. Much …
depends on the nature of Iran 's
anti-Semitism.” But the author is at fault in that he takes for granted the
propagated Jewish notion that Iran is anti-Semitic – be it in one form or the
other – without offering any proof that would be independent of the Jews.
Furthermore, to bridge the gap between the image of an
individual that's obsessed with Jews, and that of a nation that may be
undergoing a process of acculturation similar to that of Germany, George Will
rejects the Netanyahu contention that the “Final Solution” was planted in
Hitler's head by an Arab, invoking instead the work of Daniel Goldhagen who
basically argued that Hitler did not make Nazi Germany; it was the long history
of Germany that made Hitler, and made most of the compatriots who embraced
anti-Semitism.
To be thorough in his presentation, George Will says that
the Goldhagen argument was not without opposition. He mentions Christopher
Browning who said that acculturation alone could not explain the Khmer Rouge's
wholesale murder of Cambodians or the Chinese slaughter of other Chinese during
the Cultural Revolution.
What seems to have happened here is that Browning
disregarded the fact that this sort of behavior is common to all civil wars,
attributing it solely to the Marxist ideas which, he says, motivated the Khmer
Rouge and the Maoists of China. But what about the American Revolution, Ceylon,
Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam, Rwanda, Sudan, now South Sudan, Iraq, Syria,
Nigeria, Congo, Somalia, Libya?
Still, the Browning argument led Timothy Snyder to formulate
the notion that ideas have consequences. This being the case in his view, he
expanded on the argument saying that “the Holocaust's origins have been hidden
in plain sight, in ideas Hitler articulated in 'Mein Kampf' and speeches.” All
of a sudden, Hitler went from being simply a monster to being more troubling
than a madman.
And why is that? Because he implemented the logic of a
coherent worldview, says Snyder. It is a view that rejected philosophy itself,
replacing it with the Darwinian view of survival to the fittest, especially in
matters of competition where the survival of the species (in his case the
superior Aryan species) is at play.
But why Hitler's obsession with the “inferior” Jewish
species which he singled out from among the others? Because the Jewish ideas
were the opposite of his own. Whereas he embraced the savage world of our
zoological heritage, the Jews embraced the lofty world of us being created in
the image of God – free to decide on the kind of future we build for ourselves,
says Snyder.
George Will picks it up from there and applies the lesson to
Iran ,
a nation that may someday be equipped with nuclear weapons. He says that its
anti-Semitic ideas could well “disconnect it, as in Hitler's case, from
calculations of national interest.”
That is, Will is saying that knowing the West will send Iran to kingdom come if it attacked Israel with nuclear weapons; the Iranian leaders
may, despite all that, throw self-preservation to the wind and attack Israel .
So we ask: Who or what is the culprit in all this? The
answer according to Snyder and now George Will is our ability to think new ideas.
It is the idea that's generated when freedom of speech is allowed to flourish.
And that, my friend, can only lead us to conclude that this
whole messy enterprise is nothing more than another Jewish attempt to
monopolize free speech by stifling that of everyone else. The facts are clear;
these people will stop at nothing.