MEDIA MATTERS Supports Infanticide?

I am not quite sure how and why I got embroiled in this hit by the left wing media watchdog group, Media Matters, against radio and television talk show host Glenn Beck. But I did, compelling me to respond.

Apparently Beck criticized Hillary Clinton for suggesting that the issue of national health care is back on the political table, and did so in the context of the Anglican Church’s position supporting the withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from some prematurely born infants, which some media mistakenly reported as endorsing euthanasia. I didn’t see the segment, but apparently Beck compared the Anglican Church’s position to the killing of Baby Knauer, who I have called “the first victim of the Holocaust,” since his infanticide opened the door to the murder of 250,000 disabled infants and adults in Germany during World War II.

This is how Media Matters put it: “Beck said the [Church of England] report was ‘a very slippery slope’ and compared it to the case of ‘Baby Knauer,’ a blind and physically deformed infant who Beck claimed ‘was allowed to die’ in Nazi Germany and whom Beck, echoing Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley J. Smith, described as ‘the first victim of the Holocaust.’ Beck then juxtaposed Hitler’s decision to create ‘a panel of expert referees, which judged the infants and found out which ones were eligible for death’” (Where I am mentioned, Media Matters links this column I wrote for the Weekly Standard last March, criticizing Dutch plans to legalize eugenic infanticide.)

Where to begin? First, Baby Knauer wasn’t “allowed to die,” he was murdered at the request of his parents, who had petitioned Chancellor Hitler to permit their son to be killed by doctors. Hitler granted the request and had the murder personally supervised by one of his own physicians, Karl Brandt. (Brandt would later be hanged at Nuremberg, in part for his participation in the German euthanasia program.) Source: The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton.

Second, the German infanticide pogrom did indeed, as Beck said, involve panels of so-called experts who sorted through the medical records of disabled infants deciding which ones deserved the “healing treatment” of being killed.

Third: The doctors who committed most of the infanticides were not doing so because of Nazi orders, but rather, because they enthusiastically accepted eugenics theory.

Finally, I would never compare Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal and political views to anything that came out of Nazi Germany.

So, why involve me in MM’s beef with Beck? No doubt it was to bring up the name of the dreaded Discovery Institute as a way of, (in the minds of Media Matter’s editors), damning Beck. (We wear their scorn as a badge of honor!)

But talk about shallow thinking among the minions of Media Matters: Please read my original piece. In it, I differentiate the current Dutch plan for legalized infanticide from the Nazi pogrom of 1939-1945, but point out that the Dutch plan is no different in kind or degree from the murder of Baby Knauer—meaning that Media Matters: A. Agrees that it was right to murder Baby Knauer, and thus sees disabled infants as being part of a killable class. B. Is utterly ignorant of history, C. Didn’t read my Weekly Standard column even though they linked it, or D. All of the above.

I choose D.