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Carson Claims the Backing of Rabbis Over Gun/Holocaust Remarks

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson claims that he received the backing of many in the Jewish community for his most recent suggestion that Jews obtaining guns in the 1930’s could’ve prevented the Holocaust.

In an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning, Carson said that in the last several weeks, he’s heard “from many people in the Jewish community, including rabbis, who said, ‘You’re spot on. You are exactly right.'”

He also contended that his rise in the polls, now leading in Iowa – according to recent polling –  is proof that the media is just trying to “to stir things up and try to make this into a big, horrible thing.”

The remarks, which Carson blames on the media for turning it into a controversy, were made during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN earlier this month. “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” he said. “There’s a reason these dictatorial people take the guns first.” The Republican hopeful was immediately called out by The Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “Ben Carson has a right to his views on gun control, but the notion that Hitler’s gun control policy contributed to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate,” Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s National Director, said in a statement. “The small number of personal firearms available to Germany’s Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.”

In an Op-Ed penned for The Jerusalem Post last week, Carson wrote that he “ever intended for my words to diminish the enormity of the tragedy or in any way to cause any pain for Holocaust survivors or their families.”

Asked on Sunday by the Meet the Press host, Chuck Todd, whether he still believes that if the Jewish citizenry were armed during the Holocaust, during the ’40s, that they would have been able to stop the Nazis? Carson replied: “I wrote about societies, before tyranny was able to take root, that the tyrants tried to rid the people of the mechanism to defend themselves. So it was said in that context. And I think it is generally agreed that it’s much more difficult to dominate people who are armed than people who are not armed. You know, some people will try to take that and, you know, make it into an anti-Jewish thing, which is foolishness.

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