US actress Alyssa Milano compares Pence to Himmler

Alyssa Milano juxtaposed a photo of Pence visiting a detention center for illegal immigrants with one of the Nazi SS chief walking by a POW camp.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

American actress Alyssa Milano created a furor over the weekend by implicitly comparing Vice President Mike Pence to Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler in a tweet.

The liberal activist displayed a picture of Pence visiting a Texas detention center Friday, with illegal migrants behind a fence, below a photo of the Holocaust architect observing Allied POWs behind a fence in a prisoner camp during World War II.

There were no captions, but Milano made the modern picture black and white, sharpening the alleged similarity.

Reactions on social media were mixed, with some accepting the idea that conditions for some detainees are harsher than they should be. Pence in fact addressed the problem after his visit, saying that the men he had seen “were in a temporary holding area because Democrats in Congress have refused to fund additional bed space.”

Many users pointed out the stark differences between the two situations and derided the actress for her ignorance of history.

“This is absolutely insane,” wrote one. “Go educate yourself on the Holocaust, and the American immigration laws.”

Fox News contributor David Webb wrote, “You’re an idiot. How many Jews walked hundreds of miles to break into a concentration camp? It’s an idiotic analogy and I’d say the same thing to her face.”

Milano’s message seemed to support Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who aroused a furor of her own last month when she used Holocaust imagery to criticize administration policy on border-jumpers. The New York Democrat claimed that the American detention centers were “concentration camps on our southern border.”

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum slammed the lawmaker for her statements at the time, saying it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now.”

Milano is a #MeToo activist as well as a television actress, with over two million people following her social media posts. She shunned the annual Women’s March this year over anti-Semitism.