I find it offensive, even anti-Semitic, when people equate whatever they don’t like with Nazism, trivializing its horrid crimes, and we see one prime example of this in today’s Times, in Stephen Holden’s over-the-top review of ‘Sophie School: The Final Days.’
How would you behave during the kind of relentless interrogations that Sophie endures? If sentenced to death for your activities, would you still consider your resistance to have been worth it? In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?
Thus Holden is equating with Nazism and fascism and even the Holocaust with — what? — secret data analysis of international phone calls? Taking off our shoes in airports? Mr. Holden, go down to the Holocaust Museum in Washington and stare at the pile of shoes in Washington and then come back and write such tripe as this. Get your perspective, man. And they say that bloggers go over the top and journalists don’t? Bullshit.
