NAZIS VS. AL QAEDA

[kpete]

May 8, 2009

NAZIS VS. AL QAEDA.... If Republican leaders want to sound even remotely credible on national security, they're going to have to open a history textbook. With increasing frequency, they're arguing that suspected al Qaeda terrorists are a more serious threat than WWII-era Nazis.

The latest to make the claim: GOP Rep Pete Hoekstra, at a press conference today announcing the GOP's new "Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act," which is designed to restrict the housing of Guantanamo detainees on American soil.

Asked by a reporter whether this wasn't comparable to the detainment of Nazis in prisoner of war camps during World War II, Hoekstra said the two were "night and day" because of the threat of "homegrown terrorism" and because of 9/11.... Hoekstra appears to be making a slightly different argument: That the individual terror suspects are a greater threat than individual Nazis were on American soil because of their alleged association with terror.

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The argument, in a nutshell, is that Nazis were bad, but at least they didn't kill Americans in America. Since al Qaeda has, it makes the terrorist threat more serious than the German threat in World War II.

The flaws in this kind of thinking are overwhelming. First, as a factual matter, Rob Farley recently noted that German troops did, in fact, kill Americans in and around US territorial waters between January and June 1942. Farley explained, "I suspect that an attack on an American ship in US territorial waters would be interpreted by just about anyone as an attack on the homeland of the United States."

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I'd just add that in the 1940s, the Republicans of the era didn't feel compelled to run ads telling the public that FDR wanted to send Nazis "to a neighborhood near you."

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more:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_05/018087.php

[Jeep789]

1. Silly neo-cons everyone knows that it was neo-cons that

supported Nazi's at the time and they that are adopting and honing Nazi techniques as their own now.

[Echo In Light]

5. Exactly. Hence the need to create effective 'justifications' to bolster the public's support...

...for something they otherwise would not. The people are in the process of awakening from that fog of propaganda now ...time will tell if a majority wants to downplay, sweep under the rug and pretend this hasn't been as horrifyingly comprehensive as it has, or whether the Establishment powers are simply unable to retain the disinfo stranglehold and quell dissent. I fear the former, but we'll see.

[hedgehog]

2. Not only that, but there were white Americans who supported the Nazis.

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. Not to mention that 20% of the US population was of German (or

part-German) descent; that the German American Bund had tens of thousands of active members and hundreds of thousands of supporters prior to the war, and that app. 20,000 Americans of German descent were imprisoned for part or all of the war due to fears of their divided loyalties (and that doesn't come close to the numbers of Japanese-Americans who were interred, many of whom lost their livelihoods and their savings and property when they were interred). Who does he think "loose lips sink ships" was referring to?

Compared to that, for modern 'domestic terrorists' we have a small group in Miami who, with no weapons, explosives or training were supposed to blow up a building in Chicago - a city which I'm not sure any of them had ever visited; a group who, with no weapons, explosives or training were supposed to blow up a buried aviation fuel facility on a military base; and a pair who, with no weapons, explosives or training were supposed to blow up either the Brooklyn Bridge or the Lincoln Tunnel (nobody ever seemed to have decided which).

The question here is, are these guys stupid, or do they think the American public is?

[Karenina]

4. Stunning, isn't it?