Buchanan column was pure racism The editors ought to have
>The editors ought to have read much more carefully before running Patrick Buchanan’s column Thursday, even if his pieces do run regularly. Whether the world’s prosperous nations can absorb all the people fleeing wars is a real question. Buchanan’s column turned it into an attack on the very humanity of the people risking their lives escaping tyrants and terrorists.
Buchanan sets up an opposition between Europe and "the Islamic world and the Third World," who given the opportunity will be "repopulating the continent with their own kind, as the shrinking native populations of Europe die out." He sees Europeans as a "particular race and tribe." Topping it off, Buchanan argues that true Europeans would be like "every species" that "reacts or recoils when another species intrudes upon its turf."
This is pure racism. Substitute Jews for Muslims, and you see exactly the language of the Nazis.
If the editors want to provoke debate on the refugee crisis, let them find writers on either side who see everyone as a human being, created in the image of the God.
It is a shame, because Buchanan does eventually say, "are we simply … people who live on the world’s smallest continent and share a belief in the equality of all peoples and cultures?" That is indeed a defining question for every modern society rooted in a historical culture and pluralistic in population and politics. Including our own.
Buchanan’s language has no place in our city’s paper, the forum of our local democracy.
Rabbi Jonathan Spira-Savett
Nashua