I hate to defend a Liberal, but...

... the attack on this guy seems unwarranted:

Controversy is swirling around B.C. Liberal Ron McKinnon after he evoked Nazi policies in criticizing the Conservative government’s plan to deal with Tamil migrants.

His own party is distancing itself from him. In fact, they are now referring to him as “this individual” amid calls from senior Harper strategists for Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff to apologize for his remarks.

Mr. McKinnon is president of a federal riding association in British Columbia and a former candidate. In a blog post entitled “An Evasion of Duty,” he wrote: “This brave new policy is sordidly familiar, akin to collaborating with the Nazis to stop the flight of Jews.”

“So they propose to stop on the high seas vessels carrying such persecuted souls, and turn them back well before they get to Canadian waters,” he wrote. “If we build the wall high enough, and make it impossible for refugees to actually get here, we can bask in our warm pious glow and never have to actually face them.”

From the Globe. And what's so outrageous about this? Well, the Cons think it's obvious:

“There are some issues which should never be politicized,” the Tories said in a memo to supporters and MPs on Thursday. An “Ignatieff Liberal Association President ... crossed the line when he likened our Government’s determination to tackle human smuggling at its source to the Nazis' treatment of Jews.”

Right, except he isn't doing that. He's likening the government's policy to the policy of previous Canadian governments, who turned away Jews who were fleeing the Holocaust. I suppose one can understand why the Cons would sooner forget that nasty bit of history, but it is indeed a part of our history, and a part that I for one would sooner not see repeated.

Strange bedfellows...

Against Islam, even Jews and Nazis can be friends:

Following the September 11th attacks on the United States, many members of the Jewish community, increasingly concerned with the threats (real and imagined) posed by radical Islam to the security of the United States and Israel took a sharp turn to the political right. Some switched party affiliations, declaring themselves "9/11 Republicans," and subsequently went on the offensive against their predominantly liberal and progressive coreligionists, whom they have accused (as Caroline Glick did in a Jerusalem Post op-ed last week) of placing concern for liberal issues, such as a woman's right to choose, over preserving the physical safety of their fellow Jews.

Shockingly, as this group, in the advancement of their security concerns and in their growing contempt for the Left, made increasingly strange bedfellows with those historically considered to be hostile towards Jewish interests (such as Evangelical Christians and free market capitalists), some Jews went even further, not only abandoning their commitments to traditional liberal Jewish values, but forming political alliances with outright antisemites.

In 2003, for example, an investigation by an European anti-racist group found that some Jews were collaborating with neo-Nazis in order to promote anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment online. Their interactions included sharing "best practices" for sending anonymous threats to mosques and other Islamic institutions.

Likewise, in 2006 a small but vocal Jewish contingent joined — to the chagrin of many in attendance — the annual conference of the White Nationalist group The American Renaissance, seeking to make common cause against the enemy purportedly shared in Islam. The event quickly devolved into a heated battle between the Jews and antisemites present. Interestingly, the debate resulted ultimately in The American Renaissance's director, Jared Taylor, issuing a statement proclaiming that Jews were a welcome part of their community.

Via Lord Palmerston in this babble thread.

Dershowitz on torture: "Hey, it worked for the Nazis!"

Crazy as it sounds, that's pretty much what Dershowitz is saying here:

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

Via babble. I can't help thinking there's a wee bit of an irony in Dershowitz, who jumps up and down and screams "anti-Semitism" the moment someone criticizes his beloved Israel, citing history's most notorious anti-Semites as exemplars of how to extract information from suspects. Of course he includes the obligatory line "I am personally opposed to torture", but then he seems to contradict himself here:

The members of the judiciary committee who voted against Judge Mukasey, because of his unwillingness to support an absolute prohibition on waterboarding and all other forms of torture, should be asked the direct question: Would you authorize the use of waterboarding, or other non-lethal forms of torture, if you believed that it was the only possible way of saving the lives of hundreds of Americans in a situation of the kind faced by Israeli authorities on the eve of Yom Kippur? Would you want your president to authorize extraordinary means of interrogation in such a situation? If so, what means? If not, would you be prepared to accept responsibility for the preventable deaths of hundreds of Americans?