James Kirchick writes: 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 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 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 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, 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 was “one of the most read articles on our Web site,” garnering some 2.5 million reader views. My own perusal of social media indicates that the piece has become a prime illustration of “virtue-signaling,” the largely Internet-driven phenomenon whereby one demonstrates his moral superiority, (more specifically, in the words of the writer who coined the term, that he is “non-racist, left-wing or open-minded”) by “saying the right things violently on Twitter.”
Indeed, a necessary consequence of broaching the Holocaust in the discussion of contentious, political debates is that one invariably characterizes those who disagree with him as, at best, indifferent to the monstrous crimes of racist genocide, and at worst approving of them. Writing about the criticisms he received for his post, Tharoor cast them all as fundamentally bigoted. “It was repeatedly argued that (with varying degrees of profanity) Muslims can’t assimilate, represent an evil religion and seek to wreak violence on the West.” While it is true that many people’s reaction to the Syrian refugee crisis has been cruel, there are several wholly legitimate, non-racist reasons to be concerned about the influx, not to mention important factual differences between the predicament of European Jewry circa 1939 and Syrians today, that render Holocaust comparisons facile.
