On Tuesday afternoon, House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) attempted to defend Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) from accusations that she was trivializing the Holocaust with her comparisons of the situation at the southern border with the concentration camps of the Holocaust. In the process, Nadler, who is Jewish, managed to trivialize the Holocaust himself, tweeting:
One of the lessons from the Holocaust is ‘Never Again’ – not only to mass murder, but also to the dehumanization of people, violations of basic rights, and assaults on our common morality. We fail to learn that lesson when we don’t callout such inhumanity right in front of us.
Taking the phrase “Never Again,” which is inextricably aligned with the murder of six million Jews as they were shot in mass executions or gassed in the Nazi death camps, and using it willy-nilly for any situation in which people are suffering is by definition a trivialization. And of course, Nadler was missing in action when the Obama administration was putting illegal immigrants in cages, so it’s not surprising he would offer a knee-jerk defense of Ocasio-Cortez targeting Trump.
But then, Nadler was also a supporter of the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration championed that posed an existential threat to the state of Israel. As Rabbi Shmuley Boteach wrote in January 2016:
When it came time to protect United States, America’s Arab allies and the State of Israel against the threat posed by Iran, Rep. Jerold Nadler chose party loyalty over the national interest … As the warnings of the critics of the Iran nuclear deal are shown to be correct with each Iranian violation of the world’s trust, Nadler’s vote becomes more troublesome as it becomes more evident he has joined the president as an enabler of the world’s most dangerous and despicable regime.
Nadler’s latest effort to rationalize his position appeared in an op-ed in the December 29th edition of the New York Jewish Week. Once again, like others who caved into the pressure from the White House, Nadler admits that the agreement is flawed, that “Iran will remain a major menace to the region and the world,” and that “even without nuclear weapons, a nuclear armed Iran would represent an unacceptable threat to the United States, to Israel, and to global security.”
Nadler’s partisanship has been on full display for years; in March, after he spoke of investigating President Trump, he pontificated, “Our job is to protect the rule of law in this country.” Yet in 1998 he zealously protected former President Bill Clinton after he was found lying regarding his affair with Monica Lewinsky, bloviating that the attempt to impeach Clinton was “clearly a partisan railroad job.” He asserted:
The effect of impeachment is to overturn the popular will of the voters. We must not overturn an election and remove a president from office except to defend our system of government or our constitutional liberties against a dire threat. And we must not do so without an overwhelming consensus of the American people. There must never be a narrowly voted impeachment, when impeachment is supported by one of our major political parties and opposed by the other. Such an impeachment will produce divisiveness and bitterness in our politics for years to come and will call into question the very legitimacy of our political institutions.
The American people have heard the allegations against the president and they overwhelmingly oppose impeaching him. They elected President Clinton. They still support him. We have no right to overturn the considered judgment of the American people. . . . [T]his is clearly a partisan railroad job. . . . This partisan coup d’etat will go down in infamy in the history of this nation.