Easy Targets

Nobody is going to complain about Naziphobia. - Barry Rubin

There's no downside to being against Nazis. Anyone can declare that the Holocaust was a great evil, anyone can say "never again". As I wrote in an earlier post,

That the Nazis did horrific things to humanity in general and the Jews in particular is well known; "Nazi = evil" is not a controversial statement. But Nazis are a "safe target". They were white, nominally Christian Europeans acting on a professed ideology of white supremacism; so it's easy to conflate them with the likes of the KKK. Best of all, they lost the war!

Commenting on the reconstituted anti-semitism program at Yale, Barry Rubin picks up this line of thought here:

But now Yale has sidestepped criticism about ending the program by changing its name slightly and choosing a new head who is an expert on Jews in France and especially the Holocaust and French literature there. No doubt we will be fed a steady diet of things like the Dreyfus affair, antisemitism in nineteenth-century French literature, and the situation in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. As if masses of studies haven't been done on such things. But obviously nothing on antisemitism from certain groups, ideologies, and individuals in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. So you see academia really cares about antisemitism, as long as the Jews involved (and in most cases their persecutors) are already long dead. Nobody is going to complain about Naziphobia.

I hope he's wrong about the Yale program, and I'm willing to give the new department head a fair chance. But the main point is this: there's little value in studying the antisemitism of the past if we ignore its most dangerous present manifestations, and by this of course I mean the ideologies of radical Islam.