News

NEW YORK, November 11, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has condemned the film “180” for comparing abortion in the United States to the Holocaust.

The ADL called the movie “cynical and perverse” and “one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years,” in a statement released Wednesday by Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.

The film “180,” available on DVD and on YouTube, is an initiative by Project Heart Changer, led by the Living Waters organization. It opens by exposing the ignorance of young Americans about the Holocaust, and then goes on to compare the American peoples’ acceptance of abortion to Hitler having the sanction of the German people to kill Jews.

The movie has gone viral on YouTube, with just under 1.5 million views in the six weeks since its release. According to Project Heart Changer more than 250,000 copies of the DVD were sold within a month of its release, with well over that number given away at American universities and high schools.

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Ray Comfort, the Jewish creator of “180,” responded to the criticism, arguing, “ADL should be thanking me. Instead they have come out swinging.”

“ADL’s motto is to fight ‘anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry’,” Comfort said. “There’s no hatred, prejudice or bigotry in ‘180.’ It’s an award-winning movie that opens with 14 people (mainly college students) who have no idea of the identity of Adolf Hitler. Clearly the American education system has failed these kids. This is a movie that educates young people about the horror of the Jewish Holocaust.”

Foxman, however, who is a Holocaust survivor, charged, “The creators of the film clearly don’t get it… No Christian who understands Jewish suffering should resort to inappropriate comparisons to the Holocaust to send a message that abortion is wrong.”

Comfort replied to the accusation, saying, “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.”

“My only explanation,” Comfort concluded, “is that they (the ADL) haven’t thought it out before they rushed to judgment. If anyone should stand up for those who have no voice for themselves, it should be the Jews.”

Watch “180” here.