Aussie PM draws fire for saying IS worse than Nazis

Australia’s prime minister has angered some Jewish leaders on Thursday by suggesting that the Islamic State movement was worse than the Nazis during World War II.

It is the third time this year that gaffe-prone Prime Minister Tony Abbott has riled Jewish Australians with Nazi analogies.

Abbott used an interview with Sydney Radio 2GB on Thursday to credit Nazis with a sense of shame for atrocities they committed.

“The Nazis did terrible evil, but they had a sufficient sense of shame to try to hide it,” Abbott said. “These people boast about their evil, this is the extraordinary thing,” Abbot said of Islamic State fighters.

“They act in the way that medieval barbarians acted, only they broadcast it to the world with an effrontery which is hard to credit,” he added.

However, Executive Council of Australian Jewry President Robert Goot says there is a “fundamental difference between organized acts of terrorism and a genocide systematically implemented by a state as essential policy.”

He says while there is no question that Islamic State is “profoundly evil,” Aboott’s comments suggesting that it is in some respects worse than the Nazis were “injudicious and unfortunate,” Goot tells reporters.

Those responsible for state-sponsored genocide were high government officials who operated in secret “not out of any sense of shame, but to avoid being held criminally responsible,” Goot adds.

Abbott says he stands by his comments, though he isn’t in the business of ranking evil.

— AP