If you've watched the Glenn Beck program on Fox News lately -- if you haven't, you'd better hurry, because the clock's ticking -- you know that Beck thinks something terrible is about to happen to Israel and the Jewish people. What that thing is he hasn't really explained, but it has something to do with the Nazis.

To that end, on his program this evening Beck went after the New York Times for their 1933 review of Hitler's Mein Kampf and claimed that the Times, despite being aware of Hitler's persecution of the Jews, took a soft tone on the Fuhrer. Beck summarized what he said was the Times' tone: “Hitler is really great! Have you seen Germany and all the happy people? OK, the Jew thing is really bad, but have you seen all the happy people?”

Beck says he knows this because “we do our homework.” Well, I do my homework, too.

The Times review of Hitler's memoir (behind the Times paywall) was anything but laudatory of the man. Contrary to Beck's claim that it treated Hitler's persecution of the Jews as an afterthought, the entire second half of the Times review is devoted to describing Hitler's “bitter prejudice and libel of the Jews,” going so far as to compare the English translation of Mein Kampf to the German original and noting that “even in the abridged translation there are pages and pages of attacks upon the Jews, but many more pages of such attacks are omitted.” (The first half of the review focused largely on Hitler's efforts to consolidate power and make Germany “ready for a war of conquest and revenge.”)

The reviewer, James W. Gerard, did make passing mention of Hitler's “good” contributions to German society, as Beck notes. But to suggest that they were the focus of the piece is an outright lie, as demonstrated by the conclusion, in which Gerard calls for unified action to stand against Hitler's anti-Semitism:

The civilized world took a strong stand against the Turks because of their massacres of the Bulgarians at one time, and of the Armenians at another, against the atrocities of the Belgian Congo, against the cruelties in the rubber forests of the Amazon. Think of our own indignation at the concentration camps of Cuba, which led eventually to the freeing of that lovely island from the yoke of Spain. With horror we read of the expulsion of Jews from Spain, and now that the world is bound in smaller compass by radio, airplane, express steamers, by constant congresses of religions and commerce, we have all of us a right to criticize, to boycott a nation which reverts to the horrible persecutions of the Dark Ages, we have a right to form a blockade of public opinion about this misguided country.

It is with sadness, tinged with fear for the world's future, that we read Hitler's hymn of hate against that race which has added so many names to the roll of the great in science, in medicine, in surgery, in music and the arts, in literature and all uplifting human endeavor.

This isn't the first time that Beck has reached into the New York Times' archive to slander the paper. Back in February, he said the Times “heaped praises” on Benito Mussolini in a 1923 article, selectively editing the article to omit the portions condemning the Italian fascist as “just as great a danger to the peace of Europe as the Kaiser's sword used to be at Berlin.”