You should probably just shy away from comparing anyone or anything to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, if you ask the German government.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration had to remind White House press secretary Sean Spicer of this on Wednesday after he suggested a day earlier that as monstrous as Hitler was, even he didn’t “sink to using chemical weapons.”
The comment, comparing Syrian President Bashar Assad with the Nazi leader, came as Spicer was defending President Donald Trump’s decision to strike a Syrian air base. The White House is accusing the Syrian government of launching last week’s chemical attack on civilians in the rebel-held town of Idlib.
Spicer’s comment “only shows what is in any case the German government’s position — any comparison of current situations with Nazi crimes leads to nothing good,” Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said, according to the Associated Press.
It’s also inaccurate. Millions of Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust, and the Nazi regime used gas chambers in concentration camps.
Spicer later apologized for his remarks several times, explaining that he “mistakenly used an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which, frankly, there is no comparison.”
Meanwhile, the six-year war in Syria has dragged on after the recent U.S. airstrike. Russian and Syrian jets have carried out bombings in the same town where toxic gas killed at least 100 people last week.
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