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B’nai B’rith International has issued the following statement:

In an hours-long speech from the Senate floor voicing his opposition to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) noted that implementing Obamacare is analogous to appeasing Hitler.

Cruz said: “If you go to the 1940s, Nazi Germany. Look, we saw in Britain, Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis. Yes, they’ll dominate the continent of Europe but that’s not our problem. Let’s appease them. Why? Because it can’t be done. We can’t possibly stand against them.’”

And later: “I suspect those same pundits who say it can’t be done, if it had been in the 1940s we would have been listening to them. Then they would have made television. They would have gotten beyond carrier pigeons and beyond letters and they would have been on TV and they would have been saying, ‘You cannot defeat the Germans.’”

Nazi comparisons are never acceptable. No matter how one feels about this issue, or any issue, invoking Nazi imagery trivializes and undermines the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi machine.

Nazi references and comparisons dilute the horror of the mass genocide that was the Holocaust.

To compare a U.S. law to anything out of Nazi Germany is unacceptable. We call on Cruz to apologize.