Conflation
Extract from Eoghan Harris of the Independent:

THE new Sinn Fein anthem is Conflation Once Again. In the Dail last week, party TD Caoimhghin O Caolain brazenly tried to put the Taoiseach on the spot by conflating Ray Burke's tax dodging with the crimes of the Provisional IRA.The Taoiseach rightly treated O Caolain like the Sean Russell statue and took his head off. Pity he didn't also take advantage of Dail privilege to flush out the covert Sinn Fein supporters in the media who do theirbit for the party, peddling similar conflations. Conflation is a crime against truth. Conflation is claiming that taking a brown envelope from a builder is equal to gunning down a garda. No it's not. Financial corruption is endemic to any open society, and indeed is evidence of a functioning democracy.Conflating minor corruption with major criminality was one of the Nazi party's crucial propaganda weapons in subverting the Weimar Republic. Goebbels and his gang spread the sick delusion that the Nazi party's criminal use of political violence was no worse than the financial and sexual corruption of the Weimar Republic. Let's get real.
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This black propaganda of conflation is taking us down a dark road. Back in the Thirties, the German people failed to distinguish between the normal corruption of the Weimar Republic and the abnormal corruptions of the Nazi party. And that conflation ended in a camp called Auschwitz.


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President McAleese's references to Northern Protestants were a regrettable reflex from her roots, rather than a reflection of her current pluralist politics, but she openly acknowledged Irish anti-Semitism in the Thirties.The media might have probed two points.First, they might have acknowledge that anti-Semitism in Ireland is still alive and sick, and sublimated in socialist attitudes to Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. How come we were the last state in the Western world to permit an Israeli embassy? How come RTE and the Irish Times single out the Palestinian cause for special support? Well?Second, they should have looked at Irish nationalism's long strain of anti-Semitism, which runs from Arthur Griffith to various republican fringe groups, and pondered one similarity between Sinn Fein and the Nazi party - combined political and paramilitary agitation.The Holocaust did not come out of a hole in the ground - although it ended there. It was the conscious product of a political party with a paramilitary wing which set out to subvert the Weimar Republic with a pistol in one hand and a ballot box in the other.

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CONFLATION is not confined to Irish domestic politics. Legions of leftists continually try to conflate George Bush with Osama Bin Laden, compare the abuses of Abu Ghraib with the mass killings in Saddam Hussein's prisons, and imply that heroic Iraqi voters are no better than Iraqi "insurgents" - who are actually evil terrorists trying to start a civil war.

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Meanwhile, let me explain something to the superannuated socialists in the media who get so worked up about white-collar crime because they're trapped in a Sixties time warp with Pete Seeger singing about how "some men kill with a gun and some with a fountain pen".Maybe these media hippies conflate fountain pens with guns. Let me give them a reality check. If you are shot with a fountain pen you feel fine, if you are shot with a gun you die.

- posted by Pat O'Sullivan @ 12:08 AM