Antisemitism Watchdog Winks While Biden And Democrats Smear Trump As A Nazi

The recent unwillingness of the Anti-Defamation League to equally treat inappropriate Holocaust comments from both sides of the political aisle has damaged the fight against antisemitism.

Only a few days before Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, the Anti-Defamation League chastised the president-elect for an inappropriate analogy. Trump had expressed shock about reports that U.S. intelligence agencies had been spying on his campaign as part of an investigation into alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 election. “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” Trump asked.

Seen in retrospect, Trump’s anger about a false claim of Russian collusion that cast a pall over his administration was more than justified. While the behavior of the Obama administration in its waning days was outrageous, dragging Nazi Germany into the argument was wrong.

In response, the ADL reiterated a principle it had articulated many times before:

The President-Elect’s use of Nazi Germany to make a political analogy is not only an inappropriate comparison on the merits, but it also coarsens our discourse and diminishes the horror of the Holocaust. … ADL always has maintained that glib comparisons to Nazi Germany are offensive and a trivialization of the Holocaust. We have a long record of speaking out when both Democrats and Republicans engage in such overheated rhetoric. It would be helpful for the President-Elect to explain his intentions or apologize for the remark.

Fast-forward to September 2020, and it appears the ADL is no longer quite so zealous to police inappropriate Holocaust-related rhetoric or to maintain at least the veneer of nonpartisanship. On September 25, during a diatribe in which he blasted Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden crossed the same line Trump had in 2017.

Speaking with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, Biden responded to Trump’s claims that Democrats were pushing the United States toward socialism, saying, “He’s sort of like Goebbels. You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge.”

The reference to Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is telling. Calling your political opponent a Nazi may not be civil or consistent with Biden’s pose as a champion of normative and decent leadership. And it’s impossible to deny that Trump sometimes plays fast and loose with the truth with his instinctual “counter-punching” against those who criticize him.

Read the rest from Jonathan S. Tobin HERE.

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