As bad as the law is, to compare Arizona’s tough new immigration law with Nazi Germany is “inappropriate and irresponsible.”
That’s what The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles said this week when they expressed their opposition to the law. They also denounced language comparing the situation in Arizona to the Holocaust, saying there was no need to “demonize opponents, even when they are mistaken, to those whose actions led to history’s most notorious crime.”
The LA Times reports:
“We don’t need on top of everything else invoking imagery that is inappropriate,” the center’s associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said Thursday in a phone interview from Jerusalem. “This type of language is toxic, is not accurate and makes the whole issue more difficult, not less difficult, to resolve.”
Before the Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to boycott most city travel to Arizona and future contracts with companies there, Councilman Paul Koretz compared the environment in Arizona now to Germany in the 1930s.
“This is very frightening stuff,” he said. “If this was being proposed at the federal level, I would think we’re absolutely at the very beginnings of what went on in Nazi Germany.”
Koretz went on to talk about his aunt dying in the concentration camps.
“And you may think I’m overstating it, but I’m not, because SB 1070 — the immigration law — is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. In addition to the law, which requires police to determine whether people they stop are in the country legally, Koretz cited the ban on ethnic studies programs in Arizona schools.
Koretz wasn’t the first to use such language.
When the boycott issue first came up late last month, Councilwoman Janice Hahn criticized the Arizona law.