Did you catch this, halfway down page 2?

America is also, of course, still a work in progress.

In context:

Foxman and Kaplan both reviewed the dangers of so public — even iconic — a figure declaiming such hatred, and remembered that when such leadership has gone unchallenged in other countries, horrors ensued.

Not least the Nazi Holocaust, which Mel Gibson’s father, by all accounts, denies and in which 6 million Jews were murdered. The Nazis also killed a quarter million Roma (Gypsies) and some 2 million mostly Catholic Poles. Slavs, such as most Poles, were also considered “inferior” by Nazis, as were many of the additional 3 million to 4 million they killed, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, mentally and physically handicapped and Soviet prisoners of war.

America is also, of course, still a work in progress.

It’s not only that throughout the 1930s the governments of Washington, London and Paris remained anti-Semitic and generally racist enough for most of their members to feel that somehow they could live with Hitler in Germany.

Nor is it possible even to count the numbers of Catholic immigrants from Europe, and Latino and Asian immigrants, who have felt the deep pain of exclusion and accusation of things that are in no way their fault — nor count the even deeper insults to the native Americans these immigrants displaced.

And African-Americans?

I still do a troubled mental double-take every time I remember that there was official apartheid in my country, the U.S.A., until I was well out of college (class of ‘65.)

Did that reporter honestly just compare the Jim Crow laws – and I’m not minimizing them AT ALL – and people who feel “the deep pain of exclusion” with the organized murder of millions of people?

Laura on August 2, 2006 at 7:26 PM

Jeez, I was hoping I was hallucinating or something and just misunderstood.

Mel Gibson gets drunk, says nasty things about jews and cops with nice racks, apologizes later and gets crucified as Hitler re-incarnate.

Jihadis while sober, say nasty things about jews, kill jews, and pledge to keep on killing jews until they’re wiped out, honored as resistance fighters and misunderstood heroes.

Reporters, presumably sober, say nasty things about Mel Gibson AND Jews, while honoring jihadis and despots.

Laura on August 2, 2006 at 8:09 PM