Last week on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” ABC News Consultant and Sarah Lawrence College professor Fawaz Gerges said:
I really believe that both the Jews and the Palestinians, basically, are, have suffered from similar historical injustices.
Winfield Myers at Campus Watch writes:
Given the number of scholars and experts in the U.S. who could comment on the Middle East, it’s remarkable that an organization like ABC News would turn to a man so willing to engage in moral and intellectual relativism. Whatever one thinks of the Palestinian question, or of Israel’s policy toward them, to speak as Gerges speaks is to cheapen the horror of the Holocaust in an effort to deny Israelis any moral foundation for their state. It’s also extremely sloppy history, especially for a scholar, and a clear attempt to use the past for contemporary political ends.
It’s hard to blame ABC News. From what I understand you have to look pretty long and hard to find a professor in today’s Middle Eastern studies departments who doesn’t subscribe to this equivalence.