ADL: Film linking abortion and Holocaust ‘cynical’ and ‘perverse’
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 3:00 am
- 6 Comments
In a press release, the League calls the film “one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years.”
The 30-minute film, which is referred to as the “180 movie,” has garnered almost 1.5 million views on YouTube and has been heavily circulated among anti-abortion activists. The creator of the film, Ray Comfort, recently announced he was sending the movie to high schools in the hopes that the movie is shown to students.
Personhood USA emailed 600,000 voters in Mississippi a link to the controversial film just a day before Mississippians would vote on the failed Personhood amendment.
According to the Anti-Defamation League’s press release:
“The film is a perverse attempt to make a case against abortion in America through the cynical abuse of the memory of those killed in the Holocaust,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor. “Not only does the film try to assert a moral equivalency between the Holocaust and abortion, but it also brings Jews and Jewish history into the discussion and then calls on its viewers to repent and accept Jesus as their savior. It is, quite frankly, one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years.”
The film “180″ is part of an initiative led by “Living Waters,” which has spearheaded “Project Heart Changer,” which aims to change peoples’ minds about abortion and get them to accept Jesus as their savior.
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In the film, Comfort manipulates the young people interviewed to view the killing of innocent Jews during the Holocaust to be the same as the killing of fetuses. First, he asks the young people whether they would agree to bulldoze innocent Jews into a mass grave and bury them alive it would save their own lives. Then he asks questions about abortion. He tells the young people who answered ‘no’ to the first question that they have just said that they would not kill innocent Jews, but they think it is okay to kill innocent babies.
“We’re talking about a Holocaust in America, in our country, that’s sanctioned by the government,” Comfort says. He goes on to claim that American people allowing abortions is doing exactly what the Germans did, that Hitler had the sanction of the German people to kill Jews.
In a statement responding to the League’s press release, Comfort said:
No one but a Holocaust survivor can really understand the horror of what the Jews suffered. But the analogy stands. Hitler justified their murder by saying that Jews weren’t human. Abortion advocates do the same by calling a baby a “fetus” (as do ADL in their press release). Yet at 6 weeks 6 days a baby has a heartbeat, eyes, a mouth and hands. We show actual footage of this in our movie. Science now tells us that at the moment of conception there is DNA, determining the eye-color, hair-color and the height and personality of the person. Destroy that, and you destroy the person.
6 Comments
Comment posted November 14, 2011 @ 12:00 pm
I wonder why ADL didn’t site http://www.180movie.com so that people can make up their own minds as to whether or not the analogy is legitimate?
Comment posted November 14, 2011 @ 12:48 pm
Ray,
Because we know ahead of time that it is not a good analogy.
There’s no comparison between the Nazi hate and prejudice fueled torture, mass murder and genocide against Jews, and the termination of clumps of cells in various stages of development. It’s ridiculous to think otherwise. Clumps of cells and fetuses (up to certain points of development anyway) objectively don’t possess the properties of personhood that we ascribe to autonomous functioning human beings–sense of self and identity, ability to make decisions, ability to communicate with others, ability to act autonomously, and more.
Are you the same Ray Comfort who believes that evolution is a conspiracy among scientists to supposedly deny the truth of the gospels?
Comment posted November 14, 2011 @ 2:01 pm
It’s not surprising that Ray is “tone-deaf” to what the ADL considers anti-Semitism. He has been shown to be totally clueless regarding science and those processes, google Comfort and bananas to see how little he understands the natural world and shows that he didn’t know that bananas had been cultivated by humans for centuries.
Comfort’s film trys to equate the Holocaust with abortion, not realizing that there is a BIG difference between a government ordering the extermination of a specific people group vs inidividuals deciding to end a pregnancy.
I am continually amazed that people are still considering abortion such a hot button issue when world population just went over 7 billion. We are continuing to add humans at a net rate of about 9000 per hour. Not per day, per hour! This means that the world needs to find the resources to replace my home town 3 times every hour of every day.
When Comfort grasps the concept that we are going to condemn millions to death due to shear lack of resources, then he can complain about being mis-interpreted.
Comment posted November 15, 2011 @ 12:11 pm
Perhaps Mr. Comfort can explain for us why, if there is a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and abortion, the Catholic Church did nothing (to put it politely) while the Holocaust was happening (shout out to Pius XII) but now claims it represents the apex of human evil and appropriates its imagery to encourage opposition to abortion.
Comment posted November 18, 2011 @ 9:57 pm
This is from Ray Comfort, a missionary from Haiti, (no relation) and not the evangelist from California. You’re right……America’s holocaust (small “h”) is no comparison to the atrocity in WWII. Since Roe v Wade, the court case that legalized adoption, until 2008, there have only been 50 million fetuses butchered. Now that may be your answer to population control, but to me, it’s “out in your face” murder. Just in passing, the other Ray Comfort is a compassionate and unselfish man. Please don’t be so easy to play the “anti-Semitic” card.
Comment posted November 23, 2011 @ 10:57 am
That there are 14 people who don’t know who Hitler was is unsurprising. What’s shocking is that there is someone who is comfortable throwing Holocaust comparisons around without knowing the definition of the word “genocide.” (Hint: it doesn’t just mean “killing lots of people.”)
And the Nazis might have forbidden abortion of healthy so-called “perfect” babies, but it was the Fascists who outlawed abortion altogether — something they have in common with the anti-choice crowd. No matter how troubling abortion may be, forcing a woman to stay pregnant against her will is contrary to a free society. Either a woman is a chattel slave, or she has the sovereign right to control her own body.
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