National Review Writer Calls Bernie Sanders a Nazi — What?

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There is something very unnerving, to say the least, about calling a Jewish politician who lost family members in the Holocaust a Nazi. But this is exactly what Kevin Williamson did while writing in the conservative journal “The National Review.” Yes, he called Bernie Sanders a National Socialist.

Williamson wrote about the Senator from Vermont and the current Presidential candidate in a piece titled “Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism.”

“In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics.”

OK, so he qualified these comments by comparing Sanders’ anti-free trade rhetoric with that made in Europe in the lead up to World War II. And yes he did acknowledge that it was unseemly to make such a statement about a Jew?

But that does not excuse this.

Any comparison of Jews to Nazis is inherently anti-semitic. It is the type of propaganda that the real Nazis of the world engage in order to wipe out the memory of the Holocaust.

It is what anti-semites do when they compare Israeli soldiers to Nazis and Arabs to Holocaust victims when they attack Israel. These people know exactly what they are doing: compare Jews to Nazis and you cloud the issues and make hating Jews OK.

Mr. Williamson’s intentions are irrelevant here. The National Review should not have run this editorial. Both it and Mr. Williamson owe Senator Sanders — and the Jewish community as a whole — an apology.