Hamas Apologists Borrow a Page from the Nazis

Rashid Khalidi is a former PLO spokesman, Colombia University’s Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies, and a preeminent anti-Israel academic who, in Martin Kramer’s words, has “spent much of his career trying to anesthetize America to terrorism, divert attention from it, or minimize it.” In the past weeks, Khalidi has repeatedly articulated the argument that what Hamas has done is no worse than what Israel is doing in response, variations of which have been heard in many quarters. To Kramer, the argument is almost identical to one made at the Nuremburg trials by Otto Ohlendorf, a high-ranking SS official who led his troops in the murder of some 90,000 Jews in late 1941 and early 1942: