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January 30, 2017

Refugees, the Holocaust, and the Danger of Illiterate and Partisan Analogies

Hitler, not FDR, caused the Holocaust. American isolationism, not refugee policy, helped him do it.

Many of those outraged by President Trump’s executive order severely restricting the admission to the U.S. of people from certain Muslim countries have compared it with Franklin Roosevelt’s callous treatment of Jewish refugees from Europe during the 1930s, a comparison encouraged by the fact that Trump’s order was issued on Holocaust Remembrance Day. While calling the president’s move “cruel and bigoted,” Walter Russell Mead and Nicholas M. Gallagher note, and correct, the mix of historical ignorance and political tendentiousness at work in these analogies:

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January 30, 2017

  1. Refugees, the Holocaust, and the Danger of Illiterate and Partisan Analogies

    Hitler, not FDR, caused the Holocaust. American isolationism, not refugee policy, helped him do it.

  2. The Trump Administration’s Holocaust without Jews

    The idea that Jews have somehow made unfair “use” of the Holocaust.

  3. A New Strategy for the Israel-Palestinian Conflict: Tell the Truth

    Forcing Palestinians to acknowledge Israel’s historical claim to the land would provide them with an honorable basis for compromise.

  4. A Personal Reflection on Jewish Devotees of Psychoanalysis—and of Radical Leftism

    The Jewish itch to believe in universal substitutes for Judaism.

  5. Who Is Carrying the Menorah on the Arch of Titus?

    Romans, not Jews.