by ROBERT FISK
CARTOON/Google
The White House press spokesperson apparently could not grasp that Hitler used a chemical weapon called Zyklon B, with which the Nazis gassed up to a million of the six million Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust
When I wrote a few weeks ago that the Middle East would at some point reach out and grab America’s crackpot President, I never guessed it would do so at such speed. Nor that the entire fandango would come wrapped up in a Hitler fiasco which dumped the White House madmen back in another hole. Nor, indeed, that an American media which had identified Trump as insane should so quickly fall into line and regard the firing of 59 Cruise missiles at Syria as a change of US foreign “policy”.
What were they talking about? There is no policy – because the President appears deranged, because most of his colleagues are barking, and because Washington no more cares about the Arab world when Syrians are gassed than it does when the Egyptian President “disappears” his own people, or when the Saudis bomb civilians in Yemen, or when US-supported Iraqi forces kill civilians trapped in Isis-held western Mosul.
But let’s start with Hitler. A President who doesn’t read books and reacts instead to night-time television news pictures obviously doesn’t know his history. The same clearly applies to his pet chump Sean Spicer.
It’s not just a question of leaving Hitler’s ghost alone; never, ever, compare anything to the horrors Hitler unleashed on the world in the Second World War. Obviously, if the White House really wanted to dump on Assad – whose name, I notice, they still cannot pronounce correctly – it should have compared the Syrian President with Saddam Hussein, who really did use gas “against his own people”.
Independent for more