UK: Times columnist opines that Jews became Nazis

Via UK Media Watch:

Whilst many condemned the parallels Ward and Prescott drew between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews, the passage was compromised by another morally repellent trope – the suggestion that Jews, as a people, didn’t internalize the right lessons from the Holocaust, and have collectively forfeited any rights to sympathy by taking on the role of oppressor.

All of which brings us to an op-ed (Do the right thing – long shadow of the Holocaust demands resolve, Jan. 31) at The Sunday Times by Kevin Pringle, a Times columnist and former communications director for the Scottish National Party (SNP).

Pringle largely used his op-ed to praise education programs in Scotland’s schools by Holocaust Educational Trust (HET), but later pivoted to the creation of Israel which, he argued, became a moral imperative after the Nazi massacre of six million Jews.

Then, there was this:

After the Second World War and for many years thereafter, Israel was a cause and country supported by progressive opinion, which is hard to imagine now.

I deplore the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians — a tragic case of the persecuted become the persecutor — and wish to see an independent Palestine as part of a two-state solution. The suffering of Jews through history, however, gives me a sympathy for the people and state of Israel that I cannot, indeed do not want to, lose.

The Times columnist’s need to criticize (Israeli) Jews in an otherwise sober meditation on the tragedy of “the millions killed and many millions more unborn because of the Holocaust” reflects a common refrain suggesting that Israelis have ‘squandered’ sympathy due to their treatment of the Palestinians.

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