Republican Jewish Coalition calls O’Rourke comments ‘demeaning’ to Holocaust

The Republican Jewish Coalition, backed by GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, has accused Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke of “demeaning” the memories of Holocaust victims by likening US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigrants to that used in Nazi Germany.

In a statement Friday, Executive Director Matt Brooks said O’Rourke “should be embarrassed to resort to Nazi name-calling against President Trump instead of putting forward serious ideas for voters to consider.”

He said the comparison demeans “the memories of the six million Jews lost in the Holocaust and the sacrifices of America’s Greatest Generation, who fought a bloody war to stop Nazism.” He said such comments “reduce the real horrors of the Holocaust and Nazism into empty, meaningless insults.”

O’Rourke made the comments Thursday night at a campaign town hall in Iowa, where he called out “the rhetoric of a president who not only describes immigrants as rapists and criminals but as animals and an infestation,” in response to a question on how he would address attacks from Republicans.

The former congressman from Texas said, “Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as an infestation in the Third Reich. I would not expect that in the United States of America.”

O’Rourke says he will avoid using similar rhetoric because “if we descend into that pettiness and meanness and those personal attacks, I’m not sure that we can win.”