Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) President Morton A. Klein, a child of Holocaust survivors, released the following statement:

Many members of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) had family members who were murdered by the Nazis.  ZOA President Morton Klein was born in a displaced persons camp in Neu Ulm Germany to two Auschwitz Holocaust survivors.   ZOA is deeply offended and appalled by former CIA Director General Michael Hayden’s disgracefully absurd tweet on June 16, 2018, comparing U.S. border policy to a Nazi extermination camp and Nazi policies.  Hayden tweeted: “Other governments have separated mothers and children” along with a picture of the railroad tracks and entrance to a Nazi death camp.  

It is repugnant, ridiculous, morally bankrupt, and even borders on denying the Holocaust to analogize U.S. border policy to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust – the Nazis’ genocidal torture and murder of six million innocent Jewish men, women and children, and millions of homosexuals, disabled persons, priests, and others.   

The US is not massacring, and burying in open graves people at the US border. They are not going into Mexico or El Salvador and murdering as many Mexicans and El Salvadorans as possible. The US is not proclaiming genocide against these or any people.

If that were happening in any way, shape or form, these people would be running away from the US border – not attempting to cross the border into the US.

My family was desperately trying to run away from the Germans. These people are trying to run to the Americans.

General Hayden should have expressed any understandable disagreement that he has with U.S. border policy in a fair, accurate and strong manner – not in this manner.  He owes all of us an apology and a retraction.