Nearly 30,000 jihad terror attacks worldwide since 9/11, and for Chomsky, one of the leading intellectuals of the Left, calls it “scapegoating.”
And as for the idea that Muslims are being scapegoated as Jews were in Nazi Germany, it’s an insult to the memory of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. It’s also a common Leftist talking point. Many, many others have made this claim before Chomsky, including Bernie Sanders; the notorious non-Muslim Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong; Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist at The Atlantic who some time ago interviewed Barack Obama about why he won’t call Islamic terrorism Islamic; liberal media pundit Reza Aslan; Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison; Nicholas Kristof, one of the New York Times’ Mideast pontificators; Canadian Muslim leader Syed Sohawardy; and Philadelphia chapter leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Jacob Bender. Many others have repeated it.
The blazingly brilliant Daniel Greenfield takes it apart in this video.
The idea that Muslims are the new Jews is put forward by the Left, but it also has opponents on the Left. In 2014, as part of his ongoing awakening to the nature and reality of the jihad threat, Bill Maher noted:
Jews weren’t oppressing anybody. There weren’t 5,000 militant Jewish groups. They didn’t do a study of treatment of women around the world and find that Jews were at the bottom of it. There weren’t 10 Jewish countries in the world that were putting gay people to death just for being gay.
Indeed. Further, no one is calling for or justifying genocide of Muslims. No individual or group opposed to Islam is remotely comparable to the National Socialists. Not that facts have ever gotten in the way of a good meme.
Maher isn’t alone on the Left in having pointed out the absurdity of likening opposition to jihad to the lead-up to the Holocaust. The late Christopher Hitchens also refuted this idea when writing a few years ago about the notorious Ground Zero Mosque proposal:
“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like.
“US academic Chomsky: ‘isolationist’ Trump unlikely,” by Ilker Girit, AA.com, December 15, 2016:
Prominent American scholar Noam Chomsky claimed the U.S. will become more interventionist under president-elect Donald Trump, despite his promises to be “an isolationist”….
Chomsky said fears about Muslims and others have played on exaggerations about the community in the same way the Nazis in Germany used stereotypes against Jewish people.
“The typical history of scapegoating is to pick vulnerable people and find something that is not totally false about them – because you have to have some element of truth – and then build it up into a colossus which is about to overcome you,” he said, giving the example of the passing of laws in Oklahoma to ban Islamic law, which would have very little chance of ever being imposed.
“I mean you know it is not zero. You can find a woman somewhere who is wearing a veil, so there is something. But that’s the way it works,” he said.
US’ supportive policies on radicalism
Chomsky also argued the US policy towards Islam “has been highly supportive of the most radical elements of Islam.”
He claimed Saudi Arabia, “perhaps the most extreme, radical, fundamentalist State in the world,” is the leading U.S. ally in the Islamic world and “uses its huge resources to sponsor its Wahabist extremism through Madrasas and so on.”
However, “at the same time we might be fighting radical Islam somewhere else. The propaganda system would create images of Islamic terror seeking to destroy us when that turns out to be the plausible kind of scapegoating,” he said….