February 9th, 2009
Iran is a Nazi State, says PetroleumWorld editorial
Scott Sullivan, writing on PetroleumWorld.com (a news site devoted to Latin American oil interests), has accused Iran of being a Nazi state:
President Obama has only one big decision to make on the Middle East and South Asia. Obama must choose between support for the multi-ethnic states of Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq on one side.
Alternatively, the US could support Iran’s new racialist, “national socialist” allies of Kurdistan and Kashmir.
A careful examination of the diplomatic record reveals that Iranian policy in the Middle East and South Asia has taken a decisive turn against multi-ethnic Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq in favor of mono-ethnic Nazi Kurdistan and Kashmir.
First, in the Middle East, Iran’s Nazi President Mahoud Ahmadinejad intends to destroy Palestine by instigating Hamas attacks on Israel from Gaza
Source: PetroleumWorld.com
And that’s just the first four sentences.
It’s not really an analogy, or even The Analogy That Cannot be Topped, because Mr. Sullivan is not saying that Iran is like the Nazi’s, he saying Iran IS a Nazi state. It’s hard to parse his argument, but it seems that he is equating “Nazi” with a mono-ethnic state that achieves this mono-ethnicity through repression against minorities. I don’t know the politics of that region well enough to know if he has made an accurate assessment of the various actors. But assuming that they are accurate, Mr. Sullivan would have improved his Nazi reference by spending a sentence early on defining what he means by “Nazi.” Surely he knows that “Nazi” evokes myriad images in our minds, not the least of which is a literal Holocaust. But he doesn’t seem to be arguing that Iran is going that far; his argument is more narrowly focused.
So his editorial would have benefited from a little bit of language defining “Nazi.” Or he simply could have read my primer and avoided the analogy altogether.
As it stands, I don’t think the Nazi comparison is particularly apt, no matter how much the Iranian president hates the Jews.
Outrage-O-Meter
Audience Reach 3
Direct vs. Indirect 8
Inappropriateness 6
Final Score 6