No, I wouldn’t go that far; I think when you join a humanitarian organization you have to share its general goals and principles, this is a reasonable requirement. This is something they probably should ask you at the interview. But what sort of items you might collect, that seems utterly irrelevant.

After reading the Goldstone Report on human-rights abuses committed during the Gaza War (December 27, 2008–January 19, 2009), all I can say is, it’s a good thing that the United Nations wasn’t around during World War II. I can just imagine its producing a supposedly evenhanded report that condemned the Nazis for “grave” abuses such as incinerating Jews, while also condemning the Allies for their equally “grave” abuses such as fire-bombing German and Japanese cities.

I find it hard to believe that it’s some kind of crime against humanity to think that the Nazis had cool jackets. There are many things you can say about the Nazis, most of them (obviously) bad. But does that extend to a moral principle that you can’t even acknowledge good fashion sense if you think they had it? That seems to verge on making the Nazis into some kind of supernatural force of pure evil—which they decidedly were not, and IMO dehumanizing Nazis increases, not decreases, the chance of a recurrence of their atrocities. Nazis loved their wives, walked their dogs, tickled their little brothers—AND killed millions of people for terrible reasons. If we can’t wrap our heads around that, how will we recognize it when (not if) it comes again?

The idea of throwing Garlasco under the bus over this seems far more disturbing than any amount of collecting military memorabilia. That really would be thoughtcrime.

P.S. Also, Henri is correct at 22—this is a pure ad hominem argument. If his work stands on its own merits, it doesn’t matter if he believes he’s the reincarnation of Hitler sent by God to complete his work.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/boot/96122

Is he required to be a perfect conformist? Now, that certainly sounds like a fascist sort of requirement.

If there are any doubts, hire another expert to check his work and his qualifications, and if it’s all good – fuck off.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/pollak/76201

This analogy is either very confusing or very clever, I’m not sure which. Without raising hackles by expressing any opinion on facts in dispute, is there any fair interpretation under which HRW can be said to be primarily working to advance the interests of underprivileged descendants of victims of Nazi genocide, as the SPLC primarily works for underprivileged descendants of victims of Confederate slavery?

If a HRW representative were to hand out souvenir Nazi memorabilia to interviewees in Gaza, would the likely response really be comparable to what a civil rights lawyer would encounter distributing Confederate souvenirs to African-Americans in Neshoba County?

Admittedly, if I were an officer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, I would try to keep any fascination with Confederate memorabilia to myself.

If the same standard was to be applied to what the right says – not internet chatrooms, but in print, on TV and on the radio, the right would be deprived of just about every prominent person in it.

B’Tselem: ‘Look, a self-hating jew’ (btw, this term is used for gladstone as well)

Well, an obvious next question is how (and how effectively) they (by which I mean the Israeli government and its U.S. allies) can create the image that American Jews mostly support their positions.

My impression has been that this faction in the U.S. subjects Jews critical of Israel(i policy) to the harshest, nastiest, and maybe most effective retaliation—nastier than how they respond to other critics (no doubt it varies with what individual or organization does the retaliating, of course, but on average…). Partly I think this is because Jews can be more effective critics (accusations that the critics are motivated by anti-Semitism are less believable). And this faction seems very determined to create the impression that it has the unanimous support of American Jews—hence entities like the “Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations”, which published a statement calling for sanctions on Iran for its treatment of demonstrators—something that pretty much every Iranian or observer sympathetic to the reform movement agrees is a terrible idea.

(So, one might ask, why do “major American Jewish organizations” oppose the Iranian reform movement? (because that is very much what CPMAJO are doing); it sounds as if they could just be neocons trying to disguise themselves as the united voice of American Jewry, but then Hillel and the Union for Reform Judaism are member organizations, so I imagine the reality is more complicated than “teh neoconz!”)

But maybe the more important reason is that Jewish organizations are much more able to retaliate against Jews than against non-Jews, by spreading false accusations, misquoting them, &c. as Campus Watch has done to universities, because they can so effectively embarrass them within their own faith communities.

My speculation is based on anecdotal evidence, not personal experience, I wonder if other people have heard or experienced something similar, or not, or the opposite?

If organisations are going to start firing people for saying stupid things on the internet, then almost every white male aged between 16 and 50 in the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand will have to be fired. Myself excepted, obviously.