Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times
Bad enough to write irrational essays. For an alleged responsible newspaper to print it shows how ridiculous the standards are today for prominent journalists. In a brief public discussion with R.W. Apple at a Neiman award ceremony he argued that there was a responsible and an irresponsible press. I challenged him and he brushed me off. The LA Times to him was responsible. Recently the Daily Beast, which merged with Newsweek (another "responsible" press), printed an essay saying that black people cannot be racist. Huh? Chu, a Harvard Neiman Foundation fellow is not the first Neiman man (or Harvard man) who published misguided irrational politically correct speech.
[From article]
Chu specifically invokes the Nazi regime's policy but then abruptly declares that there is no comparison. What Chu did in just the opening lines of his puzzling article was to downplay, intellectually and morally, the legacy of the Holocaust. Chu thoughtlessly imputes Lebensraum to Europe's embrace of refugees – a remarkable absurdity, even for the L.A. Times. The slightest reverence for history would prevent a moderately informed person from drawing connections this absurd.
By the words not "exactly parallel or equivalent to the horrors of the Second World War," Chu means to say that nothing occurring in Europe is remotely similar to Nazi policy. Nonetheless, he saw fit to throw in the Nazi references. There is absolutely no intelligible relation between National Socialism and the well-meaning bureaucrats processing migrants throughout Europe today. Chu, with a growing chorus of like-minded leftist reporters, thus engages in a patent abuse of history.
[. . .]
Neiman Foundation in Walter Lippmann House at Harvard University
To read the Holocaust into what is occurring in Europe requires the mind of either the slanderer or the ill-informed. Probably without searching very far, Chu located just such a mind: a "community leader" in Rome named Ruth Dureghello, who said of the written numbers, "It is an image we cannot bear, which brings to mind the entry procedures at Nazi extermination camps, when millions of men, women and children were marked with a number, like animals, before being sent to their deaths."
[. . .]
Orban, unlike Hitler, does not suggest that a subset of Hungarian citizens be rounded up on the basis of their religion, deported, and then exterminated. Instead, he is voicing concern about an influx of non-citizens who have forced themselves into Europe. The migrants are not Hungarian citizens, and they generally do not face deportation, much less extermination. Orban does not appear to believe that he has any moral obligation to destabilize his society in order to accommodate cross-border population flows.
[. . .]
In fact, Orban is calling for a border policy akin to that of the nation of Israel.
[. . .]
One may be tempted to dismiss Chu's article as the ahistoric musing of a leftist hack, eager to score a few rhetorical points by invoking the Holocaust. Yet, according to Chu's L.A. Times bio, he attended Harvard and was selected as a Nieman Fellow there. How could it be that such a background could produce reasoning so spurious, with such disregard for factual accuracy?
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