After President-elect Trump accused intelligence agencies of engaging in actions that Nazi Germany would have done, several Jewish organizations condemned his analogy, including one that itself made Nazi analogies about Trump.
President-elect Donald Trump scolded intelligence agencies on Wednesday for allowing the release of an unsubstantiated report claiming that the Russian government had personal and financial information about Trump.
The president-elect originally made the accusation against the media on Twitter.
“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public,” tweeted Trump. “One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
Trump stood by the remarks several hours later at his first post-election press conference at Trump Tower in New York.
“I think it was disgraceful—-disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information, that turned out to be so false and fake, out,” Trump told reporters. “That’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.”
Two Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee, criticized Trump for comparing the actions of the intelligence agencies with Nazi Germany.
“No one should cavalierly draw analogies to Nazi Germany, especially the next leader of the free world,” tweeted head of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt. “It is not only a ridiculous comparison on the merits, but it also coarsens our discourse and diminishes the horror of the Holocaust.”
The American Jewish Committee echoed Greenblatt’s response, saying that Trump’s remarks constituted “an inappropriate comparison that diminishes the horrors of that time.”
Greenblatt, however, appeared to implicitly draw an analogy between Trump and Nazi Germany in a November 16, 2016 speech at the ADL’s “Never is Now” Summit:
“There recently have been reports that the new Administration plans to force Muslim-Americans to register for some sort of master government list. Look, Islamic extremism is a threat to us all. But as Jews, we know what it means to be registered and tagged, held out as different from our fellow citizens.”
Greenblatt, also brought up Hitler in remarks he made about Trump while participating in a “dinner-style information conversation” about political and Jewish values at the Shalehevet High School in Los Angeles.
“Karl Marx was Jewish, right? People say that Vladimir Lenin, who led a lot of stuff, was Jewish. Research has found that Hitler had a Jewish grandmother. I’m not comparing the president-elect to any of those historical figures, but I simply was trying to point out that those who say he doesn’t understand us… are wrong.”
By: Jonathan Benedek, World Israel News