A rising star in the Republican Party, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene apologized Monday for affronting people with recent comments comparing the required wearing of masks on the House floor to the treatment of Jews leading up to the Holocaust.
“I’m truly sorry for offending people with remarks about the Holocaust,” the Georgia Republican told reporters outside the Capitol, saying she had visited Washington’s U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum earlier in the day. “There’s no comparison and there never ever will be.”
Greene’s comments were a rare expression of regret by the conservative agitator, a freshman whose career has included the embrace of angry confrontations with far-left progressive colleagues like Rep. Alexandira Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Her apology came more than three weeks after appearing on a conservative podcast and comparing masks adopted by Democrats controlling the House to “a time and history where people were told to wear a gold star.” She said they were “put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. This is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.” Pelosi, D-Calif., is House speaker.
Greene’s comments were condemned by establishment Republican leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who called the comparison “appalling.”
Greene is a close ally of former President Donald Trump, and her apology was seen as a moment of maturity and bipartisanship that was applauded by critics.
But as House members returned to the Capitol on Monday after a three-week break, Greene was contrite.
“Anti-Semitism is true hate,” she said. “And I saw that today at the Holocaust Museum.”
On Monday, she told reporters that when she was 19, she visited the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in what during World War II was Nazi-occupied Poland. “It isn’t like I learned about it today,” she said of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews and huge numbers of other people were killed. “I went today because I thought it was important,” she said, and wanted to talk about it as she apologized.
House leaders have recently said vaccinated people no longer must wear masks in the chamber.
Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., said he would introduce a resolution in the House this week to censure Greene.
In addition, Republicans may try forcing a vote to punish Rep. Ilhan Omar.
The far-left Minnesota Democrat recently made remarks criticized by top House Democrats and Jewish lawmakers for saying the U.S. and Israel were no better than the radical Islamic terror organizations Hamas and the Taliban.
Omar has refused to apologize.
The controversial far-left Minnesota Democrat has made many controversial remarks repeatedly since being elected.
On Sep. 11, 2019, Omar dismissed the 9/11 radical Islamic terrorists that slaughtered over 3,000 innocent Americans as “some people did something.”
A recent Washington Post opinion piece listed the rest of Omar’s long history of bigoted remarks.
Omar is a bigot with a long history of making virulent antisemitic remarks. She has said that when she hears people call Israel a democracy ‘I almost chuckle,’ that ‘Israel has hypnotized the world’ and that she prays that Allah will ‘awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.’ She shared a cartoon on social media that was drawn by the second-place winner of Iran’s Holocaust denial cartoon contest. She supports the antisemitic BDS movement, which seeks the economic destruction of Israel, and introduced a resolution in Congress comparing a boycott of Israel to boycotting Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. She said that U.S. support for Israel is ‘all about the Benjamins‘ insinuating that Jews buy American influence. And she has said that politicians who support Israel ‘push for allegiance to a foreign country’ — accusing Israel supporters in Congress of dual loyalty, a classic antisemitic trope.”
Pelosi has not condemned Omar or censured her for her past comments.
The Associated Press contributed to this article