Ian Buruma warns Israel against friends on the Right

Right-wing populists like Heinz-Christian Strache from Austria, Filip Dewinter from Belgium and Geert Wilders from the Netherlands call themselves friends of Israel and maintain they want to fight against "Islamic fascism". But these are dangerous friends for Israel, warns the Dutch-born US journalist Ian Buruma in the daily NRC Handelsblad: "By comparing Islam in general - not only Islamist terrorism - to fascism, as the right-wing populists do, and to suggest that Europe faces a threat comparable to the Nazis, is not just wrong, but dangerous. For, if it were true, any and all measures taken against Muslims, however brutal, would be justified. ... There is another potential consequence, however. False analogies with the past trivialize history. If the Israelis, or the Palestinians, are like Nazis, then the horror of what the real Nazis did has been greatly diminished."

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