Alex Koppelman: Christian right leader sorry for comparing Emanuel to Mengele

Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League have been getting some criticism for not doing more to speak out against the comparisons some people are making between Obama administration figures and Nazis. In New York magazine, for instance, Peter Keating wrote an article asking why organizations like the ADL hadn't done more, or hadn't been more effective, in countering the suggestions, saying,"[I]njecting Hitler analogies into subjects like Medicare reimbursement rates renders the Holocaust mundane, as though Nazis simply supported big government, rather than genocide."

Seems like the ADL may have gotten the message.

The first example in Keating's article was something that Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said recently:"I want to put it to you bluntly. What they are attempting to do in health care, particularly in treating the elderly, is not something like what the Nazis did. It is precisely what the Nazis did." Land also said he was giving"the Dr. Jose Mengele Award" to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and medical ethicist who's also the brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and an advisor to the White House on healthcare reform. (I've written before about the various falsehoods being spread about Emanuel; you can read that post here.)

As Keating pointed out, that comparison to the Nazis, and of Emanuel to Mengele, a man who doomed untold numbers to death and performed gruesome medical experiments on live victims, a man so cruel that even at Auschwitz he became known as the Angel of Death, drew no public response from"any major Jewish organization."...