Clay County GOP Condemned By Jewish Groups For Anti-Semitic Post

Both the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas and Jewish Community Action issued statements this afternoon condemning the Clay County Republican Party of Minnesota for a Facebook post comparing 2020 Presidential Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders to Adolf Hitler, saying that the comparison is, “ridiculous, spurious…deeply offensive and anti-Semitic.”

From JCA’s Twitter account:

The thread goes on to include their full statement:
“First, and this should go without saying, comparing any Jew to the Nazis is bad form. Hitler was responsible for the murder of 6 million Jews. This is especially gross because Bernie Sanders has talked publicly about *his own family members* murdered in the Holocaust. Second, this particular post is deeply anti-Semitic, because it compares the super-rich, Bernie’s targets, to the Jews themselves. As if to say Jews are the same as the billionaires Bernie frequently talks about. Which is also how Hitler talked about the Jews, as it turns out. Finally, it’s particularly appalling that not just a few weeks ago, we saw Chair call on Rep. Ilhan Omar to resign from Congress for a comment some felt touched on potentially anti-Semitic tropes. She, and the state party, have never commented on, let alone apologized for, the use of anti-Semitic tropes and dogwhistles in the campaign literature of Doug Wardlow and now-Rep. Jim Hagedorn. Nor have we seen them respond to this use of anti-Semitism on the party level. This post was absurd. It was disgusting. And it was unquestionably, unapologetically, anti-Semitic. We deserve a public explanation for the post from , a public apology from the party, and assurances that the person responsible will not be posting in the future.”

Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas also issued a statement:

The statement in full reads, “We condemn this disgusting anti-Semitic post by the Clay County GOP. Rhetoric comparing Jews and/or Israel to Nazis is extremely offensive and should have no place in our political discourse.

Pointedly, as our International Holocaust Remembrance Day speaker, Michael Berenbaum, said a few weeks ago: we are seeing a marked increase in the permissibility of bigoted rhetoric in our politics. We see this on both the far-left and far-right.

Trivializing the atrocities of the Holocaust through flip and false comparisons are themselves a form of Holocaust denial – and should be denounced.”

The post shared by the Clay County GOP has since been removed and Jennifer Carnahan, chairwoman of the Minnesota Republican Party, released a statement this afternoon: