Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson was criticized by Jewish groups this week for arguing that the Holocaust could have been “greatly diminished” if Germans had access to guns.
But he has a defender in Fox News’ Dr. Keith Ablow.
Ablow, who is Jewish and said he hosted a fundraiser for Carson, wrote an op-ed Friday on Fox News’ website titled “Why Ben Carson is right about Jews, the Holocaust and guns.” The psychiatrist went even further than Carson in arguing that German Jews not only never should have acquiesced to handing over their firearms, but should have forcefully resisted the Nazi government from its start.
“The mindset that Jews surrendered with their guns is far more important than the hardware they turned over: They surrendered the demonstrated intention, at all costs, to resist being deprived of liberty,” Ablow wrote. “If Jews in Germany had more actively resisted the Nazi party or the Nazi regime and had diagnosed it as a malignant and deadly cancer from the start, there would, indeed, have been a chance for the people of that country and the world to be moved to action by their bold refusal to be enslaved.”
Ablow qualified that “hindsight is 20/20” before he faulted Holocaust victims for not fighting back against their Nazi oppressors at all costs.
“It turns out it was a bad idea for any Jew to have turned over a gun,” he wrote. “It was a bad idea for any Jew to have boarded a train. It was a bad idea for any Jew to have passed through a gate into a camp. It was a bad idea for any Jew to do any work at any such camp. It was a bad idea for any Jew to not attempt to crush the skull or scratch out the eyes of any Nazi who turned his back for one moment. And every bullet that would have been fired into a Nazi coming to a doorway to confiscate a gun from a Jew would have been a sacred bullet.”