Michael Ignatieff's senior aide trivializes the Holocaust

In a bizarre and tasteless trivialization of the Jewish Holocaust, Warren Kinsella, senior campaign aide to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, has compared today's modern, liberal Czech Republic to Nazi Germany in the 1940s.

The bizarre outburst on Kinsella's blog was part of the Liberal response to the Conservative government's decision to reimpose visa requirements for travelers from the Czech Republic. Kinsella actually compared that decision to the Canadian government's disastrous decision in the 1940s to send fleeing Jews back to their deaths in the gas chambers.

Seriously.

Here's Kinsella's quote:

And, while we're on the subject of what we really want, we'd like a Minister of Immigration who isn't a xenophobic mouth-breather, now busily setting off a major diplomatic incident, and - as one expert put it - "taking Canada back to the days when it closed the door to Jewish migrants trying to flee Nazi Europe."

To save time, just vote Liberal in the Fall. We'll get rid of all of these twits for you, on one day.

I'm all for vigorous partisanship. If Kinsella thinks he can embarrass this government for reimposing visas on the Czech Republic -- as Paul Wells points out, a policy that would merely bring us back to status quo under Jean Chretien's Liberals, who also imposed visas on the Czechs -- then go for it.

But to compare bogus gypsy refugees in 2009 to the genocide of Jews in the 1940s? Well, that's a depth of tastelessness that only Kinsella could reach. Shades of his rant that Chinese restaurateurs secretly serve cat meat to their unwitting customers.

What a graceless little bigot. I'm sure the Canadian Jewish Congress is glad to be rid of him.

This would all be uninteresting, were it not for the fact that Kinsella is a spokesman for Ignatieff. Kinsella's trivialization of the Holocaust for partisan purposes fits well with Ignatieff's pattern of hostility to Israel.

During the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Ignatieff sided with the world's anti-Semites and accused Israel of being a war criminal.

And in a stunning Op-Ed in the Guardian, Ignatieff called Israel "angry and embittered", compared it to crusaders and enforcers of Apartheid, called it part of a "death cult", and said that the United States military should impose a solution on Israel using brute force.

What a nut.

Normally I'd call on Ignatieff to renounce Kinsella's profane comparison. But I don't think he'd see a problem with it.

Kinsella's friends at the anti-Semitic Canadian Islamic Congress? Well, I'm sure they're just deeper in love.