Temerity

This is the mainstream media today. This is America. God help us.

Belafonte compares the Department of Homeland Security and the deeds of the US Government to the Gestapo. Blitzer takes exception. Belafonte reminds him how American citizens can be taken away to foreign countries to be tortured without being charged. Blitzer does not deny this, but he says

"But no one has taken you or anyone else, as far as I can tell, to an extermination camp..."

Belafonte says perhaps if the Jews and other Germans had spoken up earlier [The Holocaust] might have been avoided. Blizter actually has the unabashed raw temerity to fallaciously ask:

“…are you blaming the Jews of Germany for what Hitler did to them?”

***
BLITZER: The new Gestapo. You know, those are powerful words, calling an agency of the U.S. government, the Department of Homeland Security with, what, about 300,000 federal employees, the new Gestapo. Do you want to take that back?

BELAFONTE: No, not really. I stand by my remarks. I am very much aware of what this has provoked in our national community. And I welcome the opportunity for us to begin to have a dialogue that goes other than where we've been having one up until now. People feel that I talk in extremes. But if you look at what's happening to American citizens, a lot is going on in the extreme.

We've taken citizens from this country without the right to be charged, without being told what they're taken for, we've spirited them out of this country, taken them to far away places and reports come back with some consistency that they are being tortured, that they're not being told what they've done. And even some who have been released have come back and testified to this fact.

BLITZER: But let me interrupt for a second. Are you familiar -- and I'm sure you are, because you're an intelligent man -- what the Gestapo did to the Jews in World War II?

BELAFONTE: Absolutely.

BLITZER: And you think that what the Department of Homeland Security is doing to, you know, some U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism is similar to what the Nazis did to the Jew?

BELAFONTE: Well, if you're taking people out of a country and spiriting them someplace else, and they're being tortured, and they're being charged without -- or not being charged, so they don't know what it is they've done.

It may not have been directly inside the Department of Homeland Security, but the pattern, the system, it's what the system does. It's what all these different divisions have begun to reveal in their collective.

My phones are tapped. OK? My mail can be opened. They don't even need a court warrant to come and do that as we once were required to do.

BLITZER: But no one has taken you or anyone else, as far as I can tell, to an extermination camp and by the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, even millions decided to kill them, which is what the Nazis did.

BELAFONTE: Well, Mr. Blitzer, let me say this to you, perhaps, just perhaps had the Jews of Germany and people spoken out much earlier and had resisted the tyranny that was on the horizon, perhaps we would never have had...

BLITZER: Well, wait a minute, wait a minute, are you blaming the Jews of Germany for what Hitler did to them?

BELAFONTE: No, no. What I'm saying is that if it an awakened citizenry, begins to oppose the first inkling of the subversion of government, of the subversion of our democracy, then perhaps an early warning would have saved the world a lot of what we all experienced. I'm not accusing the Jews at all.

BLITZER: Well, I just heard you say perhaps if the Jews of Germany had done something earlier then that might not have happened. That's what I thought you were getting at.

BELAFONTE: Well, what I was getting at really is that if all citizens, the Jewish community, the Christian community and all else had taken a very early aggressive stand rather than somehow suggesting or thinking or feeling that this would have gone away, we might have found that Germany would have been in a far different place than it wound up in.

Video here.

Transcript here.