[NYTr] Compare and contrast: The Reichstag fire and 9/11

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

sent by Steven L. Robinson (activ-l)

City Pages - July 24, 2007
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2007/07/compare_and_con.php

Compare and contrast: The Reichstag fire and 9/11

by Matt Snyders

Rep. Keith Ellison (Minnesota's 5th District) is taking flak from the
Anti-Defamation League for controversial remarks he made earlier in the
month. During a July 8 speech he gave to a group of atheists in Edina,
Ellison compared the Bush administration's post-9/11 actions to the
heavy-handed undertakings carried out by the Nazi government in the
wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire-initiatives that fomented Adolf
Hitler's rise to power.

"After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and
it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could
basically have authority to do whatever he wanted," a July 8 Strib
article quoted Ellison as saying.

So in a Tuesday press release, the Anti-Defamation League took Ellison
to task and demanded that he retract his remarks. "[His] comments
comparing the rise of Nazism in the aftermath of the burning of the
Reichstag to the War on Terror in the aftermath of 9/11 is outrageous
and offensive to all Americans," read the statement.

Strangely, the Anti-Defamation neglected to empirically demonstrate how
the Reichstag fire differs from the 9/11 in their statement, so in the
name of public service, we thought we'd pick up the slack and debunk
Ellison's claim ourselves:

1) Hitler suspended many articles of the Weimar Constitution in order to
gain power, whereas the Bush Administration is merely ignoring a few
aspects of our own Constitution for our own protection.

2) In the wake of the Reichstag fire, the German government did away
with habeas corpus so they could arrest enemies of the state without
trial, whereas the Bush administration has done away with habeas corpus
so they can detain terrrorists without trial. (Plus, we have no idea
how many U.S. citizens have actually been detained. For all we know,
the number could be less than four.)

3) The Reichstag Fire Decree allowed the German government to wiretap
citizens' phones and read their snail mail, whereas our own government
is able to wiretap our phones and read our e-mail.

4) Hitler enacted the above provisions as part of an intentionally
misleading, Orwellian-titled government decree (the Order of the Reich
President for the Protection of People and State), whereas the PATRIOT
Act's name is merely derived from a coincidental acronym.

So there you have it. Rep. Ellison is obviously way off base here. Click
here and tell him so:
<http://ellison.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=36&Itemid=45<br%20/>