On Monday night’s The Ingraham Angle, a show for racists, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was asked about recent comparisons being made between the Trump administration’s policy of family separation and forced deportation and family separation in Nazi Germany.
The Boston Globe had previously reported that parents whose children have been taken from them say Border Patrol agents lied about what they were doing: “[Azalea] Aleman-Bendiks, the public defender, said several of her clients have told her their children were taken from them by Border Patrol agents who said they were going to give them a bath. As the hours passed, it dawned on the mothers the kids were not coming back.” If this sounds familiar, it is because guards in Nazi concentration camps also did this.
Ingraham then sets up the attorney general to refute the comparison. “General Sessions,” Ingraham says with a smirk, “What’s going on here?”
“It’s a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country,” Sessions casually reassures her. This is the best the attorney general of the United States could come up with when asked if he was doing a Nazi thing. This is his answer!
Now here’s this from the United States Holocaust Museum’s website:
In January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany. Over half of these individuals, approximately 304,000 Jews, emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship, leaving only approximately 214,000 Jews in Germany proper (1937 borders) on the eve of World War II.
In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime had brought radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community. Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany’s Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life. By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind.
By 1938, the Gestapo started forcibly deporting Polish Jews:
Germany expel[led] approximately 18,000 stateless Jews of Polish origin who were previously residing within the borders of the Reich. Among them are the parents of Herschel Grynszpan, who will take revenge in Paris by shooting and fatally wounding German Embassy diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, on November 7.
Sessions’ understanding of history sure is fuzzy, but I’m glad he made the distinction—they’re going early Nazi here.
GET JEZEBEL RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
Still here. Still without airbrushing. Still with teeth.
