THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
(apologies to Keith Olbermann)
Dr. Keith Ablow
A Fox News contributor has offered a bizarre defense of Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s assertion that the Holocaust was the result of Nazi gun control. Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and member of Fox News’ “Medical A-Team,” wrote in a Friday op-ed column that Ben Carson is “right” and the Anti-Defamation League — an anti-Semitism watchdog that called Carson’s claims “historically inaccurate” — is “wrong.”…. Ablow does not dispute the fact — pointed out by the ADL — that the guns potentially available to European Jews during the Holocaust, even if they could legally own them, would not have been enough to overtake the Nazis. He instead argues that fiercer Jewish resistance to the Nazis, while futile in itself, would have preserved in Jews a more courageous “mindset.”…. “The mindset that Jews surrendered with their guns is far more important than the hardware they turned over: They surrendered the demonstrated intention, at all costs, to resist being deprived of liberty,” he wrote. “If Jews in Germany had more actively resisted the Nazi party or the Nazi regime and had diagnosed it as a malignant and deadly cancer from the start, there would, indeed, have been a chance for the people of that country and the world to be moved to action by their bold refusal to be enslaved.”
There are times when a poor understanding of history, stunning arrogance, and boundless hubris make for some phenomenally, mind-numbingly dense interpretations of past events. This one of those times, when ignorance and chutzpah run riot fairly overwhelm the senses and the ability to rationally comprehend life, the universe, and everything. That this comes from a person with an M.D. behind his name makes it even more distressing.
I have about as much respect for Ablow as I do for anyone else whose paychecks are signed by Rupert Murdoch…which is to say none whatsoever. The only reason I even find his ramblings worthy of mention is for the comic relief value…and also because I never cease to be astonished that the Far Right is home to so many accomplished yet distressingly stupid people.
Both Carson and Ablow have to know at some level that if you’re thinking of discussing anything related to the Nazis or the Holocaust- don’t. Just don’t. There are many things that might possibly transpire when one opens their mouth to hold forth on these subjects…and none of them are good. The opinions of both Carson and Ablow in this instance- as they are on a surprisingly wide range of subjects- are as highly objectionable as they phenomenally brain-dead. How two doctors could display such world class, achingly stupid opinions on what the Jews SHOULD have done when first faced with the Nazi threat is something I find impossible to understand. It makes my brain hurt.
Ablow’s column is filled with caveats. He discloses that he has held a fundraiser for Carson. And he acknowledges that he was “not there” during the Holocaust and “hindsight is 20/20.”
But because he was “born a Jew,” studied the Holocaust and has spoken in front of the Anti-Defamation League, he deems himself qualified to weigh in on the matter.
“It was a bad idea for any Jew to have turned over a gun,” Ablow continued. “It was a bad idea for any Jew to have boarded a train. It was a bad idea for any Jew to have passed through a gate into a camp. It was a bad idea for any Jew to do any work at any such camp. It was a bad idea for any Jew to not attempt to crush the skull or scratch out the eyes of any Nazi who turned his back for one moment.”
It’s easy to hold forth in hindsight from the comfort and security of your ivory tower about what Jews “should” have done. He may be a Jew, he may have studied the Holocaust, and he may have spoken to the ADL- but that by no means relieves Ablow of the burden of being just plain wrong, offensively so. How it is he feels qualified to critique what his forebears did or didn’t do given the safety of time and distance is frankly astonishing. Perhaps he’s just too full of himself and his own self-professed brilliance to grasp the absurdity of his statements. Or perhaps, despite the M.D. behind his name he’s Just. That. Mind-numbingly. Stoopid.
Seventy years removed from the Holocaust, the idea that anyone believes they possess the definitive answer to the question of how the Holocaust might have been prevented is patently offensive. It’s offensive to Jews, for whom the Holocaust remains (understandably) an open wound. Beyond that, it’s offensive to anyone with a functional intellect and a sense of simple human decency. You can’t fairly judge the atrocities of 70 years ago from the comfort of a television studio in mid-town Manhattan.
What makes Ablow’s remarks even more offensive (if that’s even possible) is that he’s using it to argue against gun control. It’s truly astonishing the lengths some Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © will go to justify their monstrous, self-absorbed obsession with guns. Ablow, like most Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes ©, appears to value guns over human life and is willing to go to virtually any rhetorical length to “prove” his point. Stretch his already thin logic past the point of absurdity seems to bother Ablow not a bit. Then again, when you equate having an opinion (no matter errant, inaccurate, and insupportable) with fact, as Ablow seems comfortable doing, truth probably seems as if it should be only for losers and Liberals.
Despite Ablow’s self-absorbed misrepresentation, many Jews DID resist the Nazis. Having claimed to have studied the Holocaust, I wonder if Ablow never heard of the Warsaw Getto uprising? It took the Nazis a month to break the 1943 uprising, at which time they leveled the ghetto, killing many inhabitants and deporting the rest to death camps. Facing overwhelming odds and an opponents with an exponential superiority in manpower, weaponry, and supplies, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto fought the Nazis for as long as humanly possible. They didn’t give up, the didn’t meekly board a train, and they certainly didn’t give up their guns…at least until they were pried from their cold, dead fingers. For Ablow to make the blanket assertion that Jews meekly acquiesced to their fate is beyond offensive and evidence of a deeply-flawed and deficient knowledge of the history of which he speaks. Indeed, better to be thought a fool than to be Keith Ablow….
If there’s any justice in this world, a reserved parking space will be waiting in Hell for Ablow once he sheds his mortal coil…which I suspect will be neither much noted nor long remembered.
…and the horse you rode in on, Doctor. You really are a piece of work.
