Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah begins his Aug. 17 WorldNetDaily column by claiming, "Outfits like the George Soros-subsidized Media Matters will have a field day with it – excerpting passages out of context, deliberately distorting the words I am carefully choosing and, in typical knee-jerk fashion, mocking its premise."
OK, we'll take the bait. First, in the span of his first six paragraphs, Farah tells two falsehoods. First, Soros does not fund Media Matters.
Second, Farah asserted that "national socialism ... was then and remains today, despite the denials of historical revisionists, a 'left-wing' idea. All socialism is, by definition, a left-wing notion." Which, given the Nazis' hatred of leftists and communists, cannot be true.
Farah then asserted that "Obama seeks to use his power to impose policies that have, like it or not, a striking resemblance to those Hitler promoted in the 1930s," followed by a laundry list of unsubstantiated claims such as "Infanticide" and "Unfair treatment of Jews, in Obama's case, with regard to Middle East conflict." Farah then complained that is "acceptable for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to say American citizens attending congressional town halls are swastika-carrying thugs," even though some of those protesters were indeed carrying swastikas and engaging in thuggish behavior.
Farah concludes by denying that he's unfairly likening Obama to Nazis: "Am I calling Obama a little Hitler, a Nazi or a fascist? I am saying American liberty faces very serious challenges from the country's own leadership – not from citizens who dissent against those policies. That's what happened in Weimar, Germany, too."
What Farah doesn't mention, of course, is the striking resemblence of WND's anti-Obama rhetoric to that of the Nazis against the Jews.
Fredric J. Baumgartner wrote in his book "Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization":
The great enemy the Germans had to destroy to achieve their golden age was not Antichrist but the Jews. Yet Nazi rhetoric against the Jews was remarkably similar to that about Antichrist. The Nazis looked for the marks to identify a Jew as thoroughly and eagerly as any premillennialist did for Antichrist.
As it so happens, WND has recently endeavored to liken Obama to the Antichrist. So who's the Nazi now, Mr. Farah?