"This talking point has become standard in many attempts to "contextualize" October 7. Queen Rania of Jordan made it in abbreviated form in a television interview seen by millions: “Are we being told that it is wrong to kill a family, an entire family at gunpoint but it’s OK to shell them to death? I mean, there is a glaring double standard here. And it is just shocking to the Arab world."
"I am a historian (like [Rashid] Khalidi), interested in the origins of ideas and arguments. It turns out that Khalidi’s premier talking point has a very specific genesis. It figured in the case for the defense in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, conducted by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal from late 1947 to the spring of 1948. The Einsatzgruppen were the paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany, which carried out mass murder by shooting in Nazi-occupied Europe. They destroyed well over a million Jews, and two million people all told. After the war, their surviving senior commanders were put on trial at Nuremberg, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes."