New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has gotten a lot of attention with his latest, “Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl.” Kristof, who fervently opposed intervention in Iraq during the Bush years, now wants to guilt America and Obama into taking sides in a Syrian civil war by comparing it to the war against Nazi Germany, as well as accepting thousands of Syrian refugees. That’s despite there being no Nazi-style genocide plan, and the war taking place in a land where America has no vital strategic interests. Add to that the concerns about refugee sexual violence that took place in Cologne and other places in Europe.
In addition, Kristof’s previous callousness toward the persecution of ordinary Iraqis makes him look pretty hypocritical when he now wants America to lead the world in taking Syrian refugees.
On April 30, 1941, a Jewish man here in Amsterdam wrote a desperate letter to an American friend, pleading for help emigrating to the United States.
“U.S.A. is the only country we could go to,” he wrote. “It is for the sake of the children mainly.”
A volunteer found that plea for help in 2005 when she was sorting old World War II refugee files in New York City. It looked like countless other files, until she saw the children’s names.
“Oh my God,” she said, “this is the Anne Frank file.” Along with the letter were many others by Otto Frank, frantically seeking help to flee Nazi persecution and obtain a visa to America, Britain or Cuba -- but getting nowhere because of global indifference to Jewish refugees.
We all know that the Frank children were murdered by the Nazis, but what is less known is the way Anne’s fate was sealed by a callous fear of refugees, among the world’s most desperate people.
Sound familiar?
President Obama vowed to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees -- a tiny number, just one-fifth of 1 percent of the total -- and Hillary Clinton suggested taking more. Donald Trump has repeatedly excoriated them for a willingness to welcome Syrians and has called for barring Muslims. Fears of terrorism have left Muslim refugees toxic in the West, and almost no one wants them any more than anyone wanted a German-Dutch teenager named Anne.
Kristof failed to ponder why rich Muslim nations like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates aren’t taking in their nearby, suffering co-religionists. Instead, he dumped historical guilt on America.
The obstacle was an American wariness toward refugees that outweighed sympathy. After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews, a poll found that 94 percent of Americans disapproved of Nazi treatment of Jews, but 72 percent still objected to admitting large numbers of Jews.
The reasons for the opposition then were the same as they are for rejecting Syrians or Hondurans today: We can’t afford it, we should look after Americans first, we can’t accept everybody, they’ll take American jobs, they’re dangerous and different.
“The United States, if it continues to be the world’s asylum and poorhouse, would soon wreck its present economic life,” the New York Chamber of Commerce warned in 1934.
Some readers are objecting: But Jews weren’t a threat the way Syrian refugees are! In the 1930s and ’40s, though, a world war was underway and Jews were widely seen as potential Communists or even Nazis. There were widespread fears that Germany would infiltrate the U.S. with spies and saboteurs under the cover that they were Jewish refugees.
In this political environment, officials and politicians lost all humanity.
Kristof, the sometime pacifist, wants Obama to intervene in Syria.
History rhymes. As I’ve periodically argued, President Obama’s reluctance to do more to try to end the slaughter in Syria casts a shadow on his legacy, and there’s simply no excuse for the world’s collective failure to ensure that Syrian refugee children in neighboring countries at least get schooling.
Today, to our shame, Anne Frank is a Syrian girl.
Kristof picks and chooses his military interventions, often it seems, based on which political party holds the presidency. Kristof bragged that we were being greeted as liberators in Libya in a 2011 column that has not aged particularly well.
In July 2003, Kristof, who opposed the Iraq War, argued for U.S. intervention in Liberia. He callously explained why he favored intervention there while being against it in Iraq: “The difference is not that Saddam slaughtered at most 1 percent of his population over the last 14 years, while Liberian warfare has killed more than 6 percent of its population so far.” So Saddam's slaughter of "at most" 200,000 people? Someone willing to play such number games to justify one intervention but not another doesn’t get high marks for either sensitivity or consistency, and it certainly doesn’t inspire confidence in his ahistorical comparison of Nazi Germany and present-day Syria.
