Not Even Close

Apparently, success in politics is not predicated upon how well one performed tackling the analogy questions on the SAT's Verbal section.

In her otherwise spirited and welcome second debate performance Wednesday night, Carly Fiorina made an unfortunate and forced policy analog between the Iran Deal and the brouhaha surrounding defunding Planned Parenthood.  What makes it all the more galling is that she ostensibly reverted to using a similar series of historical and political fallacies that the Obama administration has used to proffer the JCPOA.  I doubt that Fiorina--her own personal views on abortion notwithstanding--actually believes that pro-life forces actually have a "right to deceive" to forward their policy goals, but by using a spliced--not even edited--video--as her Trump [sorry] card, she all but endorsed the tactic.

Another similar false analogy employing historical fallacies can be seen making the rounds of social media regarding the ostensible "refugee crisis" hitting Europe right now.   A few progressive outlets were comparing the "undocumented" crisis to the Holocaust last summer; now even some Jewish hand-wringers are going as far as self-flagellating over a perceived attitude that announces "I sure as hell don't want them coming here".  

In addition to the fact that I have not seen anything anywhere on the web where an indentifiable Jewish concern expresses the above sentiment [which in certain cases may not be all that morally perturbing as "open borders" advocates wish it to be], anyone and everyone should be infuriated by the need to even waste the effort to provide the requisite education in history and politics to fellow MOT's who are ostensibly steeped in both.  I accused a Facebook friend who posted the about sentiment as engaging in borderline anisemitism, one exercise in inappropriate hyperbole deserving another [social media is just more honest than the genteel backstabbing occurring in academia under the classy veneer.  Honest debate hasn't existed since at least 1968.]

However, just to make the central point that should pre-empt any more attempts at forcing the above analogy: the Jews in 1938--under the threat of annihilation because of who they were--had nowhere to go, and the world basically legally codified closing all borders to them.  Aside from the Yazidis, no one faces anything near that level of a genocidal threat.   Additionally, the international community is spending all sorts of political capital trying to make everyone else responsible, so no one is going to actually get together and make a concerted, united effort to close borders again.  But after what happened to the Jews, they--and by extension Israel--are the LAST group[s] of people who should have ANY moral responsibility to speak up, other than to say "It's YOUR problem."

Finally--there is the sordid matter of Ann Coulter's "f---ing Jews" tweet.  In truth, her antisemitic blurt is probably less dangerous than Obama and the State Dept. dogwhistling about "lobbyists" in the debates over the JCPOA, or Chief Obama TL'er Jon Stewart basically taking sides in last summer's Gaza war while pretending to be evenhanded. She also likely miscalculated about how far she could ride Donald Trump's coattails back to the mild cultural relevance she once had and lost, figuring that his anti-PC stance would "trickle down" and make her less of an outlier than she currently is.

Nevertheless, the progressive types who might cry that conservatives who don't call her out might be engaging in the same moral relativism of which they accuse their Leftist counterparts of engaging in might have a very slight prima facie point.  For about 22 seconds.

And this should be easy to rectify.

While Coulter's dogwhistle might have been unintentional [though her comments in 2007 about "perfecting Jews" by converting them all to Christianity might reveal her true mindset], it behooves Jews of all political inclinations--but especially more conservative ones--to agitate loudly enough that she becomes considered as socio-culturally toxic as Bill Cosby currently is, even if the Left seizes on a tenuous talking point that all Right-thinkers ascribe to her weltanschauung as a side-effect; she needs to be made to pay with her career, and Donald Trump must publicly and forcefully disavow any connection with her, or he needs to be made to pay a political price as well.

There are times when insane questions can be parried with sane considered answers.  There are other times when a querent needs to be forcefully embarrassed into both silence and compliance; later on, the answer can be proffered in ways that make everyone think that the truth was so obvious that whomever posed the question suffers further abject humiliation in public, and no one ever again tries to put "f---ing" and "Jews" together in a phrase.

Jews need to be respected, even by our ostensible erstwhile allies.