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Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser <http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=020386de6e&e=95fdfeaa2b>. The Bad-Faith Analogy Between Syrian Refugees and Jews Fleeing Nazi Germany Why the comparison is more ‘virtue signal’ than productive policy stance By James Kirchick <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=7d8dde6006&e=95fdfeaa2b> |December 4, 2015 12:00 AM The flood of refugees fleeing war in Syria, and the heated opposition to their resettlement in Europe and America, have inspired comparisons to the plight of European Jews who attempted to escape Nazi clutches over seven decades ago. “The people who want to close the door on Syrian Refugees are no different from those who closed doors to me and my family in 1939,” declared <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=163969019b&e=95fdfeaa2b> Aryeh Neier, president emeritus of the Open Society Institute, who as an infant fled Nazi Germany with his family for the United Kingdom. “This growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939,” *Washington Post* columnist Dana Milbank recently wrote <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=462868d6cc&e=95fdfeaa2b> about the “xenophobic bidding war” instigated by the likes of Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson, all of whom have appealed to the basest fears of the American public. It would take a blog post by one of Milbank’s colleagues, however, for the analogy to go viral. Highlighting a 1939 Gallup poll reporting that 61 percent of Americans opposed accepting 10,000 Jewish refugee children—coincidentally, the same exact number of Syrians that the Obama administration has pledged to take in 2016—Ishaan Tharoor, a writer for the *Post*’s WorldViews blog, concluded, “Today’s three-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, is 1939’s German Jewish child.” (In September, Tharoor had made the same <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=89ba3853b7&e=95fdfeaa2b> point about European reactions to the crisis, in a post entitled, “Europe’s fear of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930’s anti-Semitism.” Invoking the Holocaust for contemporary political debates is an inherently tricky business, and as far as such comparisons go, this one is certainly more appropriate than People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ “Holocaust on Your Plate” shock campaign <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=8ce4a0d5b2&e=95fdfeaa2b> , which implicitly equated the vast majority of human beings who are carnivores to Himmler and Mengele. Tharoor would later boast that his piece likening past American attitudes about Jewish refugees to present day antipathy toward Syrian migrants <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=08e2e3c215&e=95fdfeaa2b> was “one of the most read articles on our Web site,” garnering some 2.5 million reader views <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=8caf121227&e=95fdfeaa2b> . My own perusal of social media indicates that the piece has become a prime illustration of “virtue-signaling <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=673f4ec994&e=95fdfeaa2b> ,” the largely Internet-driven phenomenon whereby one demonstrates his moral superiority, (more specifically, in the words of the writer <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=c040d16453&e=95fdfeaa2b> who coined the term, that he is “non-racist, left-wing or open-minded”) by “saying the right things violently on Twitter.” To finish reading this essay in *Tablet*, please click here <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=4d13555cf9&e=95fdfeaa2b> . follow on Twitter <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=13fc525e3b&e=95fdfeaa2b> | friend on Facebook <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=99fe0c7a21&e=95fdfeaa2b> | forward to a friend <http://us2.forward-to-friend1.com/forward?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=020386de6e&e=95fdfeaa2b> James Kirchick District of Columbia Wa09 Add us to your address book <http://jameskirchick.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&id=9569260ca0> [image: Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp] <http://www.mailchimp.com/monkey-rewards/?utm_source=freemium_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=monkey_rewards&aid=64b898a0a81dd7326f504aa05&afl=1> -- -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. 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