Glenn Beck
By Jonathan Schwartz makes an important point about the bigot Glenn Beck’s meretricious “documentary,” which aired twice last week on Headline News.
Theodore N. Kaufman was a 31-year old owner of a theatrical ticket agency in Newark, New Jersey who published at his own expense a 100-page book titled Germany Must Perish! in March, 1941. It called for the sterilization of the German population and the dismemberment of Germany, with its land being turned over to neighboring states. The book received no serious attention in the U.S., but the Nazis discovered it in July 1941. They played it up big… Late in September 1941, this pamphlet by Wolfgang Diewerge appeared in an edition, according to Goebbels, of five million… A month after publication, the Nazis released a four-page flyer to remind Germans of Kaufman’s plan…
Kaufman remained a mainstay of German propaganda for the remainder of the war, his last major appearance coming in a late-1944 pamphlet titled Never!, which collected every manner of Allied threat against Germany.
Beck’s claim to be offering “balance” — while simultaneously conceding that he is not in fact a journalist — must rank as one of the more facially absurd statements I’ve heard from him, even by his own miserable standards. To argue for “balance” is to suggest that what’s being sought is a genuinely intelligent appraisal of a particular issue. Instead, the entire program amounts to little more than race-baiting pornography, lacking even the ham-fisted competence of World War II-era anti-Japanese films. Claiming to have unearthed rare and shocking examples of Islamofascism in its natural habitate, Beck merely raids the video trove at MEMRI to deliver a decontextualized stream of of public rallies (with their obligatory “Death to America/Israel” chants); clips from Jordanian soap operas; and archival footage of Nazi rallies spliced with ominous warnings from contemporary “counterterrorism” and “Middle East” experts who oblige the host by arguing that it’s 1938 all over again. Now and again, one of Beck’s “experts” waxes profound — as when an Army colonel argues that “the suicide bomber is essentially the poor man’s nuclear weapon” — but far from being genuinely frightening, it’s all quite embarrassing, really, and I can’t believe I squandered an hour of my life watching it (at the gym, of all places).
I was pleased, however, to find the waste of time rewarded with at least one glorious moment of self-refutation, offered here by the American Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchic:
There is something in the Middle East. I don’t know if it’s in the culture or maybe just from not having a free press ever in their history, having always state-controlled media, that there seems to be very great weakness of reality testing and a very great propensity to believe wild, far-flung, paranoid ideas.
Those gullible Muslims. The shit they fall for . . .