COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
This is foolish.
First, being related to Anne Frank qualifies someone with
absolutely no expertise or even knowledge of this or any other political
matter.
She's entitled to her view, of course, but it means not a
jot more than the views of 7 billion other humans who will not receive
publicity in The Guardian.
Second, for any informed person her assertion is close to
ridiculous.
I reject most of Trump's views, but I would never compare
them to Hitler's.
I don't even understand how anyone who knows anything can
say this. Just read one of the better biographies of Hitler - Allan Bullock or
Joachim Fest, for example - and you will quickly understand why I say this.
Confusing unpleasantness and unacceptable views with
monomania and nihilism shows pretty poor judgement.
In fact, in a few areas, Trump is exactly Hitler's opposite.
He tends to be anti-imperial wars, and he voices a sensible view about Russia
and China.
These are the areas where Trump does bring something new to
American national politics. Our political systems, unfortunately, are such that
any national candidate comes with a bundle of views and issues. If you buy into
one part of the bundle, you must take, willy-nilly, the rest. No one comes with
a platform completely satisfying to most voters.
Trump comes with some very heavy baggage, yet he does have
the potential to bring some welcome change to international affairs, an end to
decades of pointless war in which the U.S. has been engaged.
I utterly reject ideas like his wall with Mexico, and
further I don’t believe it would prove doable. But it does seem to me that
criticism of him is highly selective. How is his wall proposal any different
than Israel’s walls? It isn’t, and indeed Israel is building still more walls,
but they don’t receive the publicity that Trump’s proposal does.
Again, I utterly oppose selecting a kind of immigrant who is
unacceptable, especially Muslims who are in my personal experience excellent
people.
Yet Trump has not proposed a ban or an end, he has proposed
a pause, and that is a very different thing. There can be no question that massive
Muslim – or any other specific, culturally different – migration over a short
time can cause huge social adjustment problems, as it very much is doing today
in Europe.
However, please think about the absolute root cause of this
sudden massive migration: it is America’s violent tear through the Middle East,
upsetting old societies, killing tens of thousands, destroying countless homes
and institutions. Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and others. That American savagery
is source of all our headlines today, and this consideration takes us back to
the importance of changing American foreign policy.
I think it worth noting, too, that Israel has a permanent ban
on many, many kinds of immigrants. For some recent poor black refugees it did
not want to accept, given embarrassing public outrages over black migrants, it
actually bribed some African states to take them, where I’m sure their future,
given the circumstances of their arrival, will be bleak.
Israel truly grants full citizenship to only one kind of
people, its million or so Arab citizens being both an accident of 1948 history
and a people who live under constant shadows and threats of expulsion as well
as a set of laws which do not treat them equally in almost any matter.
Of course, then there are the five million or so
Palestinians – some of whom are Christian and some Muslim – who live under illegal
occupation with daily abuse, no rights, no votes, no hopes, and not even secure
ownership of homes or farms. I haven’t heard Trump advocating anything
resembling that ghastly reality which has endured in Israel for half a century.
So, if you are of a mind to criticize Trump’s more extreme
ideas, then you should be in the forefront of doing the same for, not just a
dismal prospect, but a dismal reality in Israel.
“We haven't really
learnt anything—I’m depressed by the current situation.” I can at least say
amen to Eva Schloss on that, but I’m sure we are not talking about the same
situation.
