AJC Calls on Republican Leadership to Condemn Gingrich's 'Nazi' Comparison

NEW YORK, May 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AJC urged the leadership of the Republican Party to condemn the assertion in a new book authored by Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, that the Obama Administration's policy agenda is as "great a threat to America as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union."

"By invoking the current Administration in the same breath as two murderous totalitarian states, Newt Gingrich has drawn a foolish and dangerous analogy," said AJC Executive Director David Harris. "Gingrich's linkage not only diminishes the horror of the Holocaust, it also licenses the use of extremist language in contemporary America."

In media interviews promoting his book, "To Save America," Gingrich has claimed that  the Obama Administration is a "secular socialist machine" which represents an equivalent danger to the Nazi and Soviet regimes. While he has stressed that he did not draw a moral comparison, when speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich warned, "we are going to be in a country which no longer resembles America."

"It is vital that the Republican leadership say clearly that such analogies are unacceptable," Harris said. "Unfortunately, as the recent controversy over the new immigration law in Arizona also demonstrates, demonizing political opponents as Nazis is becoming all too common in American political debate."

SOURCE American Jewish Committee