Brad Shannon:
The Politics Blog

Brad Shannon maintains this blog. He is political editor at The Olympian and can be reached at 360-753-1688 or bshannon@theolympian.com.

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UPDATED: Jewish group assails BIAW over linking environmentalists, Nazis

• Published June 20, 2008

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The Anti-Defamation League is calling on the state’s Building Industry Association of Washington to apologize for a newsletter article in March that drew comparisons between the German Nazis of Adolf Hitler to the state Department of Ecology and the modern ecological movement.

The ADL bills itself as the “world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism.” And it minced no words in a statement issued by its Pacific regional office.

This article showed a deplorable lack of judgment on the part of the Building Industry Association of Washington, said Ellen Bovarnick, ADL Pacific Northwest Regional Director. Any attempt to compare the policies Hitler and the Nazis, which led to World War II and ultimately the death of six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust, to the actions of environmentalists is inappropriate and offensive and has no place in a debate over environmental regulation. ADL calls on the organization to repudiate the article and to apologize to anyone who may have been offended by the comparison, especially Holocaust survivors and their families.

The article, written by BIAW’s Mark Musser, ran on page 8 of the BIAW’s monthly newsletter here. Soon after, the Seattle Times’ David Postman debunked the piece in his blog. See here.

Musser, a graduate of The Evergreen State College, based the piece on his own research, but Postman found that the BIAW’s own sources disavowed Musser’s interpretation and conclusions. In a related piece, Postman questioned some of the overblown language of BIAW critics; see here.

Asking the BIAW to apologize might be a fruitless exercise. But Bovarnick of the ADL said the organization believes “it is important to take a stand against the misuse of history.’’ She said the ADL received a complaint about the BIAW newsletter a letter a week ago.

“We responded that complaint by sending a letter to the BIAW. We have not heard from them,” she said. “Our issue isn’t with the organization; it’s with this particular misuse of history.”

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