Shanda

This McCain campaign attack on Barack Obama for being "soft on genocide" on the same day he's visiting the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem is, as Robert Wexler says, pretty shameful. Especially because the comment they're using to attack him simply recognizes the limits of military capability to deal with genocide, and the need to build multilateral coalitions and use all the tools of diplomatic pressure to bear. This is why Obama actually has a better score on legislation about the CURRENT GENOCIDE happening in Darfur than McCain; because he understands it in a global context.

I thought J Street's response was a good one:

We are shocked and dismayed by today’s exploitation by aides to Senator John McCain of the memory of the Holocaust while Obama was visiting Yad Vashem in Israel.

It is one thing to have a legitimate disagreement over keeping American troops in Iraq for sixteen months or a hundred years.

It is another to shamelessly exploit the sacred memory of six million victims of the worst crime in human history to score political points in the heat of a partisan election campaign.

There is definitely an "Obama is an anti-Semite who isn't committed to Israel" undercurrent to all of this. I mean, this ridiculous flap over Obama making fliers in the language of the city in which he's appearing and appearing on the flier in profile - just like Hitler! (because imitating Hitler is a surefire vote-getter) fits into the narrative as well. While McCain's people make outrageous remarks about his commitment to stopping genocide, the fever swamps on the right compare him to a genocidist. Meanwhile, the one figure to invoke Hitler's name favorably this election cycle, radical right pastor John Hagee, just appeared on the same stage as key McCain surrogate Joe Lieberman.

One of John McCain's most prominent supporters on Tuesday praised an evangelical leader whom the Republican presidential candidate repudiated after a string of controversial remarks were made public.

Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who frequently campaigns with McCain, said pastor John Hagee's support for Israel outweighed the remarks that led McCain to reject his endorsement [...]

McCain, in an effort to reach out to evangelicals who are among the most loyal Republican voters, accepted Hagee's endorsement in March but rejected him in May after learning that the Texas preacher once said that God allowed the Holocaust to happen because it led to the creation of Israel.

Think Progress caught the following from the Christians United for Israel event:

In response to what he termed the "pretty aggressive campaign," Lieberman said in his speech, "The bond I feel with Pastor John Hagee and each and every one of you is much stronger than that and so I am proud to stand with you here tonight." Lieberman again drew a parallel between Hagee and biblical figures, this time saying biblical heroes, unlike the demigods of Greek mythology, "are humans — great humans, but with human failings." Lieberman said that Moses had his shortcomings, too. "Dear friends, I can only imagine what the bloggers of today would have had to say about Moses and Miriam."

Yes, he just compared John Hagee to Moses. This is why nobody, not even Jews, like Lieberman any more.

What a shanda.

RIP Tom Lantos

We have had an unusual amount of deaths in Congress this session, and Tom Lantos' is the latest. The man was a giant, the only Holocaust survivor to ever serve in the House of Representatives. He deserves the utmost respect for his accomplishments. He had a commitment to human rights and a position of authority as the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee for his final year. He will be missed as a hero for Democrats.

ADL: Stop Playing The Holocaust Card

Remember a couple weeks ago, when Mike Huckabee compared a woman's choice in determining their own medical care as a holocaust? And when I posted this over at The Right's Field, some of the more pointy-eared, living-under-a-bridge commenters claimed that Huck was just talking about any ol' holocaust, not THE Holocaust, and so making the comparison to mass genocide was completely in the bounds of political discourse?

Tell that to the Anti-Defamation League.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called on presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to refrain from invoking Holocaust imagery, following his recent use of the term "holocaust" to refer to abortion.

The former Arkansas governor was speaking at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. when he referred to the "…holocaust of liberalized abortion…".

In a letter to Governor Huckabee, ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman said: "The Holocaust was a unique tragedy in human history – an attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the Jewish people that led to the deliberate murder of six million Jews. We find the use of analogies to the Holocaust in other contexts deeply painful, disturbing and offensive. Such analogies can only trivialize and diminish the horror, and cause further pain to Holocaust survivors and to those alive today who lost friends and loved ones."

Indeed, all of these analogies on the right to Nazism and calling the guy who runs the traffic in Tehran the next Hitler cheapen the deaths of millions. We have challenges in the world, but they are only exacerbated by such distortions.

Today I Am Ashamed To Be A Jew (UPDATED AND BUMPED)

Like everyone of the Jewish faith, I have citizenship in Israel. One of the core tenets is rememberance, the idea that we honor our forbears by keeping them and their struggles in our thoughts. Central to this is the rememberance of the Holocaust; there is even a holiday, Yom Ha-Shoah, a tribute to those millions we lost during the Nazi Wehrmacht, and a vow to never forget the stinging power of genocide.

We have forgotten.

CAIRO, Aug. 19 -- Israel closed the door Sunday on a surge of asylum-seekers from Sudan's Darfur region and from other African countries, the largest influx of non-Jewish refugees in the modern history of the Jewish state.

Authorities announced that they had expelled 48 of more than 2,000 African refugees who have entered illegally from Egypt in recent weeks. Officials said they would allow 500 Darfurians among them to remain, but would deport everyone else back to Egypt and accept no more illegal migrants from Darfur or other places.

If this was a problem of space, or a rigid stance against lawbreaking, they wouldn't allow 500 to stay. They have put a limit on compassion for those fleeing their own genocide, the same circumstance out of which Israel was born.

Israeli officials claim that they have assurances from the Egyptians that the refugees won't be sent back to Darfur, but when asked directly, the Egyptians did allow that these Sudanese would be sent back to the Sudan. Which would be a death sentence.

An Egyptian Foreign Ministry official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel had sought no assurances about the future of the refugees. "Israel just said, 'Please take them,' " the Egyptian official said [...]

Sudan and Israel officially are enemies, and Sudan's government has said any refugees sent back from Israel would be considered as having dealt with an enemy state and treated accordingly.

"If deported to Sudan, they will be tried for treason," said Madhal Aguer, a private aid worker in Cairo for refugees from a separate conflict in southern Sudan; a long-running civil war between the north and south killed up to 1 million people before a peace deal in 2005.

Also, the Israelis claimed that they would separate those Sudanese coming from Darfur and those coming from the rest of the country, accepting those facing genocide in the region. This they did not do.

Israel sent back the first group of 48 African refugees through the Karm Abu Salim, or Kerem Shalom, crossing with Egypt late Saturday night, Egyptian and Israeli officials confirmed. Egypt said the deportees included refugees from Darfur.

Israel apparently expelled them without hearings, in contravention of a refugee accord it has signed that requires countries to determine whether deportation will subject asylum-seekers to mistreatment, said Ben-Dor, the Israeli refugee lawyer.

They have forgotten their history.

In the 1930s, when Jews were fleeing Eastern Europe in droves to escape the coming crackdown from the Nazis, Jews were denied access to Palestine by the British. In fact, many countries closed their doors to the Jews who were trying to escape Germany, Austria, Poland, and practically every country in Europe. Fueled by anti-Semitism, countries dithered and made excuses not to accept Jewish refugees. Even the United States never raised their immigration levels beyond a certain quota, which was left unfilled to begin with (one of the few countries that allowed Jews to settle was China, and many of them were transported to Shanghai, as depicted in the film Shanghai Ghetto). Hundreds of thousands of Jews were denied safe haven, which meant almost certain death in the concentration camps.

Why the Israeli government is doing this is baffling to me. I give credit to the majority of the Israeli Parliament, who actually petitioned against this. But it was to no avail. Ehud Olmert played the part of a little bureaucrat who added up numbers in a book instead of looking at the human costs involved. It's shameful, and it does violence to my ancestors.

UPDATE: Some idiot at the Corner called the influx of 2,300 "Muslims" an existential threat to Israel, and praises the deportation. First, Darfurians escaping the genocide are Christians. Second of all, as Neil says, "2300 refugees have come into Israel, which has a population over seven million, over the last six months. Israel already has over a million Arab residents. Existential threats don't come in the form of a couple thousand people fleeing genocide who would quickly fall in love with a country that rescued them."

UPDATE II: Good for Rahm Emanuel. From Jesse Lee in an email:

Ambassador Sallai Meridor
Embassy of Israel
3514 International Dr. N.W.
Washington DC 20008

Dear His Excellency Ambassador Meridor:

The British Broadcasting Corporation reports today that Israel has returned 48 Sudanese people to Egypt and intends to refuse entrance to refugees from the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan.

I am writing today to express my disappointment that Israel would turn away any person fleeing from persecution. I understand the concern the State of Israel has for maintaining the integrity of her borders, but if any country should understand the special needs of those affected by the genocide in Darfur, it should be Israel. Since its founding, Israel has been committed to finding homes for those who suffer at the hands of war and despair. The international community looks to Israel as a land of hope and sanctuary.

In 1948, the Jewish Diaspora finally had a place to call home. I hope that the state of Israel will reconsider its decision to turn away those refugees who must flee Darfur to avoid death and persecution so that the Sudanese people can find asylum in a state that was founded to be a home and a place of hope for those who had suffered similarly.

Sincerely,

Rahm Emanuel
Member of Congress