Topic: NewsBusters
In an Aug. 16 NewsBusters post, Greg Sheffield claimed that CNN's Jeff Greenfield "compared Israel to a whole host of history's evil people," including Nazis. But the transcript he attaches as evidence doesn't support the claim.
In an appearance on Don Imus' radio show, according to Sheffield's transcript, Greenfield said:
I’ve never heard it explained adequately how you solve a problem where two different people think God gave them the same piece of land. I mean, what actually, we’ve seen how you’ve made progress. And what happens is, at some point, and I don’t just mean in the Middle East, at some point, to be blunt about it, somebody gives up something. You don’t conquer them, you know, like Germany and Japan after World War II.
DeKlerk gave up, in the best possible sense, South Afirca – he said, ‘we can’t keep this going any more.’ The colonial forces, the British and French and others said we can’t run this part of the world anymore.
Essentially Mikhail Gorbachev gave up that malicious dream of a totalitarian state could change the world.
And in the American south, the white southerners, the segregationists, they were made to give up, said you know what, we can’t do this anymore. So the question I get is, who gives up what?
Sheffield doesn't offer enough transcript to provide the full context of what Greenfield said, but it's clear that Greenfield is not making a direct comparison of Israel to Nazis (or imperial Japanese, or Soviets, or apartheid-era South Africa) that Sheffield claims. What Greenfield appears to be saying is that neither Israel nor Hezbollah will be able to declare total victory over the other in the way the Allies did over Germany and Japan after World War II. Greenfield's analogy presumably applies just as much to Hezbollah as to Israel; in other words, if Greenfield is calling Israeli Nazis, he's calling Hezbollah that, too.