The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Monday condemned comments made by Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Republican Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee over the weekend comparing inaction on the nation’s debt crisis with those who did nothing as the Nazis executed millions.
Speaking to New Hampshire Republicans, Bachmann explained Saturday her wonderment at how nobody spoke up while the Nazis were murdering millions of people and said that future Americans will say the same thing about nation’s debt.
“I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action [the Holocaust],” she said. “But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to.”
Huckabee, at the annual National Rifle Association convention that same day, told a story about his daughter wondering why nobody spoke up during the Holocaust.
“Today, you will not find a spunkier activist than my daughter, and I don’t worry about her but I sometimes worry about us,” Huckabee said. “We cannot afford to be a generation that leaves our children with a huge debt and a very erosion of our values.”
Abraham Foxman, ADL National Director, called the pair’s comments highly inappropriate.
“While we understand that there are legitimate concerns about the nation’s debt, it does not justify invoking these kinds of Holocaust and Nazi comparisons,” Foxman said in a statement. “Rep. Bachmann herself acknowledged ‘there is no analogy to that horrific action’ that was the Holocaust, but she should have refrained from drawing such a parallel in the context of remarks about taxes.”
“We hope that Rep. Bachmann, Mike Huckabee and others will weigh their words more carefully and stop invoking this offensive analogy,” Foxman added.