MORE ON NIGHTLINE from reader David Bernstein:
The Elie Wiesel interview wasn’t weak. I don’t think the program was anti-Semitic, but it didn’t do a good job at all at establishing the two relevant points: (1) Some supporters of Israel abuse the term “anti-Semitic” by hurling it at anyone who disagrees with the supporters’ views on Israel; and (2) that shouldn’t obscure the fact that some critics of Israel are in fact motivated by anti-Semitism.
The low point was the Hitchens interview, both the gratuitous information that his mother was Jewish and his wife is Jewish, and his insistence that it’s equally bad to compare the Israelis to Nazis and Yasser Arafat to Hitler. Excuse me, but the Palestinians have been sympathetic to Nazi views of the Jews at least since the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem allied himself and the Palestinian cause with Hitler during WWII. The Arab media routinely publishes political cartoons that could have come straight out of Der Sturmer. Anyone who read the chilling interview with Hamas leaders in Gaza (who are now officially alllied with the PA in the West Bank and Gaza) in the Times a couple of weeks ago could see the genocidal intent. The PA media incites hatred against Jews, denies Jewish historical connections to the land of Israel, even the Temple Mount, and Arafat himself has never distinguished between the killing of Jewish civilians and the rest of his “liberation struggle.” The Nazi analogy may be an exaggeration, but it is not inapt.