Julia Gorin at Political Mavens details a particularly jaw-dropping case of moral equivalence.
I had to do a double take when I read these opening paragraphs in Saturday”s Salt Lake Tribune:
Holocaust survivor mesmerizes students
He was just a little older than his audience when the Nazis starved him and showed him such unspeakable brutality. He’s still talking about it now.
The reaction at Fort Herriman Middle School last week was to stand and cheer his courage. Days after a teenager went on a shooting rampage in Salt Lake City, students at Jordan School District middle schools were mesmerized by David Faber, a Holocaust survivor who weighed 72 pounds when he was freed from a concentration camp at 18. He was the same age as Sulejman Talovic, the Trolley Square shooter.
What was that? Come again? Where did that line come from? What is it doing there? What is its meaning? It appears that the Salt Lake Tribune has made it official: A Killer Muslim is no worse than a Jewish survivor. Said differently: a Jewish survivor is as bad as a Muslim killer. Said another way: A Jew who wasn’t killed is as bad as a Muslim who has killed.
The author doesn’t even make a bland comparison of this victim of an atrocity to the victims of the killer. No, she compares a Jew who survived death to a Muslim who caused it. She is equating a villain with a victim, with someone who actually witnessed the Holocaust and didn’t go about killing people later as a result, to someone who left an enclave “” which was not a labor or death camp “” before any killing of its inhabitants took place. She’s comparing someone guilty of the kind of genocidal behavior and religious persecution that the other person was a victim of.
But the dumbness doesn’t stop there. She also bases the comparison on age similarities, but there isn’t even enough for that. She compares the survivor’s age at rescue to the killer’s age at killing, which gives the whole thing even less sense, if possible, since Talovic left Srebrenica when he was four.
Read it all.