Confused in Cologne

According to a new poll, a majority of Germans think Israel = Nazis:

51 percent of respondents said that there is not much of a difference between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians today and what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust, compared to 49% who disagreed with such a comparison, according to the poll carried out by Germany's University of Bielefeld.

The survey also found that 68 percent of Germans believe that Israel is waging a "war of extermination" against the Palestinians.

Writer/blogger Arthur Chrenkoff--who fled Communist Poland for Australia in 1988--objects:

Where does one even begin to tackle this sort of absurdity? That if there is "not much of a difference" between the Second World War and the Second Intifada, where are today's concentration camps, where is Auschwitz, where are the gas chambers and the crematoria, where are the mass graves, where are the Einsatzgruppen and the SS? Or maybe it's not that Germans don't know what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians - maybe they don't know what their own grandfathers have done to the Jews? Maybe Germans think that the Holocaust consisted of Wehrmacht shooting a few Jewish kids throwing stones at the Panther tanks, or Luftwaffe taking out a Jewish Fighting Organisation leader in retaliation for a suicide attack on a Munich beerhall? . . .

[T]he sentiments expressed in the German survey are not based on logic or cold hard facts, they are not something that can be argued with, at least not with expectations of quick success. Who's to blame? The educators? The media? The political leaders? All of the above? I fear for Europe which has so lost its moral compass, sense of proportion and common sense, for it will have difficulties facing any serious problems and challenges - both foreign and domestic - that are clearly on the horizon.

I'm glad we re-elected a President who doesn't give such a misguided populace the power to veto America's foreign policies.