A Crude Comparison

On what grounds should we be offended by Rep. Keith Ellison's analogy between 9/11 and the Reichstag fire?

In a July 8 speech, the nation's first ever Muslim congressman said that President Bush's post-9/11 policies "kind of reminds me" of the Reichstag fire.

"After the Reichstag was burned," the Minnesota Democrat said, the Nazis "blamed the communists for it, and it put the leader of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."

In defense of his analogy, Mr. Ellison later told the Star Tribune that the Bush administration seized increased arrest and surveillance powers after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Mr. Ellison's wild historical association does nothing to advance our understanding of the events surrounding September 11. The comparison to the Reichstag fire rests on two pillars. The first is culpability: Does the congressman really believe that the Bush administration itself was responsible for the worst ever terror assault on American soil? That is the implication of what he said. After all, the general view among historians is that the Reichstag fire was set by the Nazis themselves and blamed on the communists in order to justify the assumption of emergency powers.

According to William Shirer's account in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," "The whole truth about the Reichstag fire will probably never be known … Even at Nuremberg the mystery could not be entirely unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own political ends."

Mr. Ellison's inept historical comparison draws on what the historian Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." FDR knew in advance about the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor but kept silent in order to draw America into the war, the moon landing was shot in a studio in Arizona, the CIA killed JFK, etc., ad nauseam.

The second pillar of Mr. Ellison's analogy concerns the widening of executive power that followed both the Reichstag fire and 9/11. According to Shirer, "By the next day, Hitler prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree ‘for the Protection of the People and the State' suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties."

"Some four thousand Communist officials and a great many Social Democrat and liberal leaders were arrested," Shirer writes, "including members of the Reichstag, who, according to the law, were immune from arrest. This was the first experience Germans had had with Nazi terror backed up by the government. Truckloads of storm troopers roared through the streets all over Germany, breaking into homes, rounding up victims and carting them off to S.A. barracks, where they were tortured and beaten. The Communist press and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat newspapers and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of the democratic parties either banned or broken up. Only the Nazis and their Nationalist allies were permitted to campaign unmolested."

Did Mr. Bush, and his evil side kick, Mr. Cheney, arrest the leaders of the anti-war movement? Did they send the leading Democrats to concentration camps? Did they ban liberal magazines, newspapers, and radio programming? Did Republican storm troopers roam the streets of American cities "breaking into homes, rounding up victims and carting them off to … barracks, where they were tortured and beaten"?

Mr. Ellison has been pilloried for drawing analogies between our situation and the Nazis and, under fire from the Anti Defamation League, he backpedaled. "It was probably inappropriate to use that example because it's a unique historical event without really any clear parallels," Mr. Ellison said, adding that he did not want to diminish "the horror of the Nazi era … "

But all this misses the main point. In a "Seinfeld" episode, Jerry's dentist, Tim Whatley, converts to Judaism and immediately allows himself to tell Jewish jokes — humorous stories offensive to Jews relying on anti-Semitic stereotypes.

If the newly minted Jew can tell Jewish jokes, Mr. Seinfeld figures he will level the playing field by ratting the dentist out to his former Catholic priest. Mr. Seinfeld enters a confessional booth and speaks with the priest through the screen.

"I wanted to talk to you about Dr. Whatley," Mr. Seinfeld tells the priest.

"I have a suspicion that he's converted to Judaism just for the jokes."

Unsure of just what Mr. Seinfeld is getting at, the priest asks, "And this offends you as a Jewish person?"

"No," Mr. Seinfeld replies. "It offends me as a comedian."

That's it, exactly. Mr. Ellison's crude comparison is not wrong because he tries to connect it to the Nazis; rather his remarks betray hostility toward Mr. Bush bordering on paranoid delusion. Mr. Ellison's comparison of 9/11 to the Reichstag fire does not offend me as a Jew; it offends me as an American.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.