Reform leader: O’Reilly trivializes Holocaust

By · October 3, 2008

A Reform Jewish leader criticized a popular talk show host for comparing Nancy Pelosi to Adolf Hitler.

Bill O’Reilly made the analogy on the Sept. 30 edition of Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor” when discussing the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives’ body language.

“You know who used to do that, who practiced for hours before making a speech? And I’m not making any comparison here. So don’t – your crazy left-wing Web sites out there, it’s not a comparison. Adolf Hitler,” O’Reilly said.

He went on to say that Hitler practiced for hours “all of his gestures and everything else before he went out there.”

Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, in a letter to the program’s executive producers, David Tabacoff and Amy Sohnen, wrote that “such an inappropriate, ill-conceived analogy represents a smear campaign designed to further divide an already politically polarized American public.”

Noting that O’Reilly in the past has drawn parallels between current politicians and Nazi Germany, Saperstein wrote, “Such repeated comparisons by Mr. O’Reilly display blatant insensitivity to the far-reaching effects of the evil perpetrated by Hitler and the Nazis” and “trivializes the distinctive evil that Hitler represents.”