but personally I'd have some lines I wouldn't cross, if I knew they had experienced traumas as profound as the Holocaust. Point out what they're doing wrong, yeah, but I would steer well clear of associations with something like that, unless it was undeniably every bit as bad.

And that still holds even for people who aren't my friends, though maybe not for the same reasons: most people are very unlikely to seriously consider your arguments after you've made them furious.

I think he's just arguing that the Left is wrong on this - and to a large extent, those 'getting hurt' by the Left's simplistic views of colonialism and noble savages getting exploited by the West, were really just their own governments, and there wasn't much harm done. But not so in the case of Israel. Note I'm not talking about the Stalinist purges here - nor was that the main point of Palmer's article, I agree that that part of his article is weak for multiple reasons, but I don't believe he intended to suggest that the purges were only bad when they were aimed at the Jews.