Frank Jewish Outrage at the ‘Nazi’ Health Care Debate
Has everyone gone to the Hamptons? Why aren’t Jews everywhere loudly outraged that health care reform is being compared to the extermination of six million people?
One Jewish politico is breaking what seems like a deafening silence. In the video above, Massachusetts congressman and media darling Barney Frank is “calling on [his] ethnic heritage” (his words) to do exactly what other Jewish political leaders are refraining from: calling the Nazi bombast that has entered the health care debate what it is — ludicrous.
Scene: a town hall meeting in Dartmouth, Mass.
A pixie-haired young woman calls Obama’s proposed health care reform a “Nazi policy” while holding a photo of the President wearing a Hitler-style mustache. Frank responds by calling her words “vile nonsense,” and says that engaging her would be like arguing with a dining-room table. Cue applause from liberal attendees. The clip circulates throughout the mainstream media.
No one’s quite sure how exactly Hitler reemerged in the health care debate. The Washington Independent reports that the pixie who tested Frank’s temper is a “LaRouche cultist,” meaning she supports the fringe organizer whose campaign imagined the mustachioed Obama photos that read, “I’ve changed.”
When Rush Limbaugh likened President Obama’s health care logo to Nazi symbolism, the ADL condemned his blabber as usual. The American Jewish Congress also vehemently opposed Limbaugh’s rhetoric, and urged all Americans to “make plain their disgust at the comparisons … by a prompt use of the off button.” There is where the problem lies. Mr. Limbaugh’s musings are typically of the ridiculous variety. Americans without talk radio platforms are showing up to town hall meetings with swastikas, doctored photos of a mustached Obama, and even one man with a gun (a local police chief deemed it legal) strapped to his leg. Why are Jewish groups like ADL and AJCommittee only going after Limbaugh, a veritably easy target? Where are the Jewish senators, representatives and local leaders on this issue? Barney Frank has come forward. Let’s hope he won’t stand alone.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
