What We Talk About When We Talk About GorkaThe campaign against Trump’s adviser teaches us why we should never, ever flatten our history to score cheap political points
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/231133/gorka-forward-vitezi-rend-trump?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=295f15046a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_04_26&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-295f15046a-207700181“Every young person holding a placard to protest my parents and myself—I challenge you now: Go away and look at everything I have said and written in the last 46 years of my life and find one sentence that is anti-Semitic,” Sebastian Gorka said yesterday before walking out of a panel at Georgetown University. “You won’t find one.”
Gorka is right. But who cares? More specifically, why do I care? I’ve spent much of the last two months talking about Sebastian Gorka, and I’m tired. When I raised objections to the ludicrous assertion—repeated frequently and loudly by numerous media outlets—that the senior aide to President Donald Trump is some sort of crypto-Nazi, I was accused by many people of being a Gorka apologist.
Let’s get some things out of the way. I’ve never met Sebastian Gorka and don’t know much about his work on Islam or terrorism. I’m also not a fan of his boss, Donald Trump, which I’ve made clear in one or two or three hundred articles this past year.
What I object to—and what my interlocutors maddeningly refuse to engage with—is the effort to use history and Jewish memory, in particular, the crimes of the Holocaust, in the service of partisan political tricks. The falsification of history, in particular, the history of the Holocaust, is something that all Jews should object to because it is both the foundation and also the most frequent justification for Holocaust denialism. Indeed, it gives aid to Holocaust deniers—in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe—by using the same methods they do and giving credence to their loathsome rhetoric, which seeks to erase history by insisting that all crimes are the same, whatever their scale.
What I am asking readers to do here is to resist, for a few minutes, the social-media-driven knee-jerk outrage du jour, and instead consider the far weightier issue of how these arguments play into an abuse of history.
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