What did he say?
Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.
The lawmakers said that Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that ”Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.”
Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, was responding to arguments that the United States should shut down the prison, located on a U.S. naval base in Cuba, the lawmakers said. Mariko Peter, a member of the Dutch Green Party, who began the exchange with Lantos, said she took notes of the remarks.
This is not the first time Tom has ripped on Europe. But, what was his motivation in this case? Was it true outrage? Or something else?
Before the Guantanamo exchange, the lawmakers had discussed a debate in the Netherlands about whether the country should maintain its 1,600 troops serving in NATO’s Afghanistan operations.
”You have to help us, because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany,” Lantos said, according to the Dutch lawmakers.
”The comments killed the debate,” said Harry van Bommel, a member of the Socialist Party. ”It was insulting and counterproductive.”
I’m not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories, but I have to wonder whether the comments were intentionally insulting in order to tick of the Dutch lawmakers to get them to pull their troops from Afghanistan. Na. Lantos, unlike many Democrats, is a big, and vocal, supporter of the Afghanistan operations. Which begs the question, what did he think he was doing?
In all seriousness, it is hard to tell whether Lantos was right or not. It was a different time, no one really new the murder house were in full swing, and there wasn’t the media presense we have today. But, perhaps he was not referring to times past, but to the way Europeans think about Auschwitz these days in comparison to G’itmo.
Liberals worldwide tend to think of G’itmo as some sort of massive torture house, while at the same time so many care little for the plight of those of the Jewish faith, accusing them of all sorts of atrocities. It is not the Arabs that attack Israel that are the problem in their world: it is the Israeli’s who are the problem. Liberals seem to take the side of Iran, with their Holocaust denying president, over that of the USA and the people that Ahmadinajad has threatened to wipe out. Twice. They love that map shown at a United Nations conference which had no Israel on it. And they like to think of the United States as a horrific torturing country.
In Liberal World, penning someone up and exposing them to conditions which are too hot or cold, and making them listen to Christina Aguilara is worse then Jews being gassed to death and then fed into fires.
Some of the lawmakers said that while they found the physical conditions of the prison acceptable, they remain concerned that prisoners were not being given proper legal treatment.
Most of the delegation called for the closing of Guantanamo.
”We have to close Guantanamo because it symbolizes for me everything that is wrong with this war on terror,” Peters said.
Holding terrorists is apparently wrong, in liberal world. We should let them go, so they can go back to killing the infidel.
What do they want us to do with Guantanamo and the prisoners? None of the lefties ever seem to answer that question.
But, hey, it is OK with Liberals to compare the USA to Nazi Germany.
BTW, keep an eye on this DU thread about the story.
In these United States 87% of the Jewish vote goes to the Democrats. Jews ARE the liberals and are one of the bases of the Democratic Party.
And of course prior to our entry in WWII conservatives were pro Nazi it was the left that fought against them isn Spain.