President Joe Biden issued a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday in which he warned that “Holocaust deniers and minimizers are growing louder in our public discourse.”
He should know: he is part of the problem.
For two years, Biden minimized the Holocaust by comparing President Donald Trump to Nazis, including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, and falsely claiming Trump had supported neo-Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville in August 2017.
In his statement Wednesday, Biden referred to the Charlottesville riot: “The horrors we saw and heard in Charlottesville in 2017, with white nationalists and neo-Nazis spewing the same anti-Semitic bile we heard in the 1930s in Europe, are the reason I ran for president.”
Thankfully, Biden did not repeat the lie he spun for the entire campaign — namely, that Trump had called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” when in fact Trump said that the neo-Nazis should be “condemned totally.”
But Biden has never taken back his false claims. Nor has he apologized for repeatedly comparing President Trump to Nazi propaganda minster Joseph Goebbels, a rabid antisemite who was one of Hitler’s closest aides.
Biden claimed that Trump, like Goebbels, believed telling a “big lie” often enough would convince people that it was true. (Ironically, Biden has used that tactic, both in repeating the Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax and other easily disprovable lies about Trump.)
It was not the first time Biden compared Trump to Goebbels.
As the New York Times noted in 2019, Biden did so on the campaign trail when he called for Trump’s first impeachment.
“He’s spending tens of millions of dollars this early in the campaign to engage in the democratic primary to spread lies,” Biden said. “He’s trying to orchestrate a campaign where truth and the facts are irrelevant. In Goebbels-ist terms, you say it long enough, often enough, people may believe it.”
Biden’s use of the Goebbels analogy drew criticism from the Jewish community — not just the Zionist Organization of America on the right, but also from some Jewish Democrats on the left.
Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D), for example, whose mother survived Auschwitz, tweeted that Biden had “desecrated the memory of six million Jews who were murdered” in the Holocaust when he compared President Trump to the notorious Nazi official.
But Biden neither listened, nor learned.
In late October, Biden went even further, publishing a music video that compared Trump to Hitler, and implied Trump supporters were like the German crowds who returned Hitler’s salute.
And earlier this month, after the Capitol riot, Biden did it again, comparing Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) to Goebbels because they objected to the certification of the Electoral College vote — something that Democrats had done in the past.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) stated several years ago that analogies to the Holocaust have “no place in politics.”
Then-ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor, explained: “The Holocaust and Hitler should not be part of the discussion over which party is best equipped to lead this country for the next four years. Politicians and their supporters and surrogates should stop invoking Hitler and trivializing the memory of the six million and millions of others who perished in the Holocaust.”
Biden ignored that message, and has persisted in “trivializing the memory of the six million and millions of others who perished in the Holocaust.” Not only has Biden divided Americans against one another, but he has also minimized the unique evil of the Holocaust.
Biden should apologize — to Trump; to Cruz and Hawley; to Jews; and to Americans in general — for minimizing the Holocaust, and he should work to repair the divisions that his rhetoric helped exacerbate.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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