ABC News Analyst Fawaz Gerges Says Jews of the Holocaust, Palestinians Suffered "Similar Historical Injustices"

On the December 14 broadcast of National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" devoted to discussing the recent Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, ABC News Consultant and Sarah Lawrence College professor Fawaz Gerges argued that the Holocaust and what he called the "tragedies of the Palestinians" were "similar historical injustices." Gerges was interviewed from Egypt, where he is a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo. Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, was also interviewed and strongly disagreed with Gerges's statements.

Gerges's last words on the show, hosted by Lynn Neary, were: "I really believe that both the Jews and the Palestinians, basically, are, have suffered from similar historical injustices."

I've included many more quotations from Gerges's comments at Campus Watch.

Given the number of scholars and experts in the U.S. who could comment on the Middle East, it's remarkable that an organization like ABC News would turn to a man so willing to engage in moral and intellectual relativism. Whatever one thinks of the Palestinian question, or of Israel's policy toward them, to speak as Gerges speaks is to cheapen the horror of the Holocaust in an effort to deny Israelis any moral foundation for their state. It's also extremely sloppy history, especially for a scholar, and a clear attempt to use the past for contemporary political ends.

Bruce Kesler suggests this quotation as a means of shedding futher light on the abuse of history, from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949):

"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."

Let's work to ensure that this doesn't come to pass--again.