Ghosts of the Holocaust
BERNARD KOUCHNER, France's new foreign minister, has a long and distinguished record as an advocate of intervention in countries whose citizens' human rights are abused.
In 1971, he co-founded Doctors Without Borders and later explained to an interviewer that, in doing so, "we were establishing the moral right to interfere inside someone else's country." In the 1990s, he supported military intervention against the Serbs in Kosovo. Then it was Saddam Hussein's mass murder of Iraqi citizens that persuaded him to support the war in Iraq. One should always be careful about attributing motives to other people's views. But Kouchner himself has often said that the murder of his Russian-Jewish grandparents at Auschwitz inspired his belief in humanitarian interventionism.
One may or may not agree with Kouchner about intervention, but his motives are surely impeccable. And, indeed, there are many prominent intellectuals in Europe and the U.S. -- often those with a leftist past, many of them Jewish -- who, like Kouchner, are sympathetic to the idea of using American armed force to further the cause of human rights and democracy in the world. Some can be classified as neoconservatives, and others, like Kouchner, are better described as liberal interventionists, but their views often derive from the same wellspring: that the use of force is justified to avoid another Holocaust, and those who shirk their duty to support such force are no better than appeasers.
To be sure, if we were less haunted by memories of appeasing the Nazi regime in the 1930s, and the ensuing genocide, people might not be as concerned about human rights today as they are. And by no means do all those who work to protect the rights of others invoke the horrors of the Third Reich to justify Anglo-American armed intervention.
However, the term "Islamofascism" has not been coined for nothing. It urges us to see today's threat as a natural extension of Nazism. Hussein, who was hardly an Islamist, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is, are often described as natural successors to Adolf Hitler.
Yet analogies with the Third Reich, although highly effective as a way to denounce people with whom one disagrees, are usually false. The reality is that there are no Islamist armies about to march into Europe, and neither Ahmadinejad nor Osama bin Laden, nasty rhetoric notwithstanding, has a fraction of Hitler's power.
