GOP silence draws calls of ‘hypocrisy’ after lawmaker compares Dems to Nazis
Democratic group slams lack of Republican rebuke of Mo Brooks, who read from ‘Mein Kampf’ on House floor and compared tactics described within to those of US ‘socialists’
WASHINGTON — Jewish Democrats lashed out at Republicans on Wednesday for what they said was a stunning case of hypocrisy, after the party failed to condemn a congressman who compared the tactics of the Democratic Party to those of the Nazis.
While GOP officials and organizations excoriated Democrats over the Ilhan Omar controversy, they haven’t spoken out about Mo Brooks’ reading from “Mein Kampf” on the House floor, and drawing a parallel between the “big lie” it espouses and the one he claimed Democrats were guilty of perpetuating.
“It’s absolutely hypocritical,” said Hallie Soifer, the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “Their silence is deafening.”
On Monday, the Alabama Republican congressman read directly from Adolf Hitler’s 1925 manifesto to compare Democrats and the media to Nazis.
Condemning the Mueller investigation, Brooks accused journalists and the president’s political opponents of perpetuating a “big lie” about potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, borrowing a term that Hitler coined to blame the German government for World War I.
“A big lie is a political propaganda technique made famous by Germany’s National Socialist German Workers Party,” Brooks said, referring to the Nazi Party. “For more than two years, socialist Democrats and their fake news media allies — CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Washington Post and countless others — have perpetrated the biggest political lie, con, scam and fraud in American history.
“In that vein, I quote from another socialist who mastered big lie propaganda to a maximum, and deadly, effect,” he said.
“‘In the Big Lie, there is always a certain force of credibility because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily,'” he read out. “‘It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously, even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation.’
“Who is this big lie master?” Brooks continued. “That quote was in 1925 by a member of Germany’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party — that’s right, Germany’s socialist party — more commonly known as the Nazis. The author was socialist Adolf Hitler, in his book ‘Mein Kampf.'”
After referring to Democrats as “socialists,” Brooks said Hitler was “another socialist who mastered big lie propaganda to maximum and deadly effect.”
It’s unconscionable for a member of Congress to demonize an opposing party by claiming it's comparable to Nazism. The vicious Nazi regime was responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews and millions more. This is dangerous and @RepMoBrooks must apologize. https://t.co/DQpxJUEg6s
— ADL (@ADL) March 25, 2019
The Anti-Defamation League described Brooks’s remarks as “dangerous” and “unconscionable” and called on him to apologize.
As of this writing, no major GOP group or leader has spoken publicly about the incident or demanded that Brooks retract his statement and apologize.
“Not one Republican or Republican organization, including the Republican Jewish Coalition, has said a word about this,” Soifer told The Times of Israel.
“There is no question in my mind that if these kind of statements — the reading of “Mein Kampf” on the House floor — were made by a Democrat, Republicans would not only be calling for their removal from committees but for their resignations.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition and the Republican National Committee did not respond to a request for comment.
Ron Klein, chair of the JDCA, said that his organization criticized Rep. Omar after she said that Jewish lobby group AIPAC paid politicians to support Israel and that pro-Israel advocates were pushing lawmakers to have an “allegiance” to the Jewish state, an insinuation that critics said amounted to the charge that Jewish Americans have “dual loyalty” to Israel and the United States.
“This is a very egregious statement and use of reference: ‘Mein Kampf’ and Adolf Hitler, this is as bad as it gets,” Klein told The Times of Israel. “When Republicans don’t say anything, it just paints a very clear picture that their response to Ilhan Omar was all apart of a political wedge game.”
After Omar’s most recent controversial episode, House Democrats passed a resolution condemning various kinds of hatred, with an emphasis on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Republican critics said that was a “watered down” version of the measure, since it didn’t narrowly target Omar.
At last weekend’s AIPAC Policy Conference, a number of Republican speakers depicted Democrats as unwilling to confront anti-Semitism among their ranks.
“It’s astonishing to think that party of Harry Truman, which did so much to create the State of Israel, has been co-opted by people who promote rank anti-Semitic rhetoric and work to undermine the broad American consensus of support for Israel,” US Vice President Mike Pence told the confab.
“The party that’s been the home of so many American Jews for so long, today struggled to muster the votes to unequivocally condemn anti-Semitism in a resolution.”
