CHICAGO — Republican candidate for governor Darren Bailey, who faced bipartisan criticism for declaring that Holocaust deaths during World War II paled in comparison with lives lost through abortion, contends Jewish community leaders have told him he was right.
Bailey’s campaign did not respond to a request for the identities of the Jewish religious leaders who he said agreed with his comparison of abortion to the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews.
“The Jewish community themselves have told me that I’m right,” Bailey, a state senator and farmer from downstate Xenia told WSPY-FM of Plano during a weekend visit to the Kendall County Fair in Yorkville.
Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who is Jewish and has made abortion rights a key campaign issue against Bailey, has run a TV ad featuring the Republican’s making the comparison in a 2017 Facebook video.
“The attempted extermination of the Jews in World War II doesn’t even compare on a shadow of the life that has been lost with abortion,” Bailey says in the Facebook video, made during his run for state representative.
Pritzker’s ad, which notes Bailey’s opposition to abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother, calls the Republican “too extreme for Illinois.”
Bailey faced condemnation from Democrats as well as some fellow Republicans for citing the Holocaust in the political debate over abortion. Pritzker and others have contended Bailey’s remarks were “disqualifying” for someone seeking the state’s top office.
In response to Pritzker’s ad, Bailey’s campaign last week released a statement in which the GOP contender said, “The Holocaust is a human tragedy without parallel. In no way was I attempting to diminish the atrocities of the Holocaust and its stain on history. I meant to emphasize the tragedy of millions of babies being lost.”
But over the weekend, when asked if he owed the Jewish community an apology for making the comparison, Bailey said he did not.
“All the people at the Cabads (apparently referring to members of Chabad, a Jewish religious movement) that we met with and the Jewish rabbis, they said, ‘No, you’re actually right,’ ” Bailey said.
“So no. And that’s what’s frustrating, you know, when government, when elected officials, copy and paste these messages and turn them into something that they’re not because anybody that would watch my message, the whole nine minutes of it, would understand exactly what I was saying and where I was going with this,” Bailey said.
But several Jewish groups and community leaders, including the Anti-Defamation League Midwest and the Springfield Jewish Federation, described Bailey’s comparison as “inappropriate,” “deeply offensive” and something that does “an incredible disservice to the millions of Jews and other innocent victims killed by the Nazis.”
On Twitter, Democratic state Rep. Bob Morgan of Deerfield, who chairs the House Jewish Caucus, responded to Bailey’s latest comment as a “member of the Jewish community,” saying that Bailey was “not ‘right’ to belittle the deaths of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, including my great-grandparents. More clear for you?”
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