Discussing what I took to be some strange reactions to Obama's Cairo speech last week, I referred to the suggestion from some that, by mentioning both the struggle against apartheid and Israel-Palestine on the one occasion, the President was licensing the Israel/apartheid analogy. By way of disputing this fanciful idea I said one might just as well infer, from the fact that he'd spoken of the Holocaust and the plight of the Palestinians in consecutive paragraphs, that he was treating Palestinian suffering and the fate of the European Jews under Hitler as on a par. This was offered by me as a reductio ad absurdum.
Lo and behold, I find that Melanie Phillips has offered the same thing in all seriousness. Quoting the two paragraphs in question, she says that 'Obama appeared to draw a subliminal equivalence' and she calls it an 'awful and revealing linkage'. I think 'subliminal' is rather handy for her here. The fact is that Obama drew no equivalence and, for any listener or reader not actively looking for trouble, he didn't even appear to. There is no respectable rule of exegesis according to which material in adjacent paragraphs must be there in the shape of a moral equivalence and, other than 'subliminal', Melanie gives not one word in support of her contention that these two paragraphs had the function for Obama of proposing one.