When Nazi Metaphors are OK and When They are Not

The Jewish Fund for Justice recently organized a petition of Rabbis to send to the President of Fox News. The petition argued that Fox News host Glenn Beck was trivializing the holocaust by continuing to refer to George Soros as a Nazi collaborator (when he was 14 Soros was sent to a non Jewish family to hide and he, Soros, helped one of the family members who worked for the Nazis identifying Jewish property).

Beck is obviously pushing the outer limit (maybe past the outer limit) on defining 'Nazi collaboration').

However, when George Soros himself said that Fox News is like the media that enabled the rise of Hitler the JFfJ defended the statement.

I don't know enough about that period of history to know how much the German media of the early 1930s (after Hitler assumed power in early 1933, the media did become an important propaganda tool) enabled the rise of Hitler (Soros was born in 1930 so he probably doesn't remember much of that period either). Since I think the Nazis frequently blamed the 'jewish controlled media' for their problems, it is hard to understand what Soros is talking about.

Anyway, it seems to me that comparing Fox News to Nazi enabling media is at least as detached from reality as calling Soros a 'Nazi collaborator'.

JFfJ = guilty of hypocrisy.

or it could be that (as noted in the Commentary piece hotlinked below) since the JFfJ receives funding from Soros, they simply can't bring themselves to criticize him.

Jewish Fund for Justice PA announcement re the criticism of Glenn Beck is here.
Commentary's discussion of the JFfJ defense of Soros is here.

Hillary Accuses Iran of Hypocrisy

Secretary Clinton gave an extended statement (Feb 14) on Iran in which she accused Iran of Hypocrisy. Here is a quote (near as I can get it)

"...What we see happening in Iran today is a testament to the courage of the Iranian people and an indictment of the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime - a regime, which over the last three weeks has constantly hailed what went on in Egypt. And now, when given the opportunity to afford their people the same rights as they called for on behalf of the Egyptian people, [Iran's leaders] once again illustrate their true nature,"

Although I dislike the "Iranian regime", I'm not sure about the charge of hypocrisy. Yes the Iranian regime hailed what went on in Egypt (an ambiguous phrase) but did they (the Iranian regime) actually say, "Egypt should afford freedom of assembly" or "Egypt should refrain from the use of force when dealing with protesters". I think Iranian regime used more ambiguous remarks in which they said something like "hooray for the protesters" and meant something like "Hail to Egyptians for humiliating an ally of the US".

Unfortunately, I can't certify this as hypocrisy.


video here

Is Bob Edgar (CEO of Common Cause) a Hypocrite

Recently, Common Cause (whose CEO is Bob Edgar a former US Representative) sponsored or organized or facilitated (they paid for a bus to transport protesters) a demonstration in Palm Springs California. The demonstration was to protest a meeting of Koch Industries. This would be a non event except that some citizen journalists (I think conservatives) taped a two demonstrators specifically calling for the lynching of Supreme Court Justice Thomas and others calling for the assassination of Justice Scalia, Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas (method unspecified) and the wife of Justice Thomas and also urging the hanging of Fox News President Roger Ailes (there seemed to be only about 50 people in the demonstration so that means that almost 15% of the people in attendance advocated killing someone).

Whether this shows that Common Cause attracts (or recruits) 'haters' or whether the activist left in general attracts 'haters' is not my subject of analysis. Nor is the fact that while Justice Kennedy wrote the decision, the hate speech was directed at Justices Thomas, Roberts and Scalia.

However, the interesting thing about this from the issue of hypocrisy is the reason for the demonstration. Apparently Common Cause is against the Supreme Court's decision in 2010 that in essence, gave corporations the same rights to free speech as individuals. Common Cause is a corporation.

Does this make Common Cause hypocritical? I think the answer might be 'no' because, Common Cause could say that they favor free speech for non profit corporations but not for for-profit corporations (notwithstanding that this may be a difficult argument to make legally and which would obviously be constitutionally dubious given the decision already made. However, for the answer to be no, Common Cause should organize a protest of a George Soros or some other left wing rich person funded organization (e.g., Media Matters). If they don't do that, the answer goes from 'no' to 'yes'. The LATimes has an editorial along these lines. The NYTimes has a pro Common Cause editorial.

The self serving 'it was just a few bad apples' argument in the press release does make me think Common Cause is sleazy and intellectually dishonest but those are other issues.

The Common Cause PR release apologizing for the views of some of the demonstrators is here.
The video of this event is here.