CHICAGO — Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is once more condemning state Senator Darren Bailey for the Republican candidate’s 2017 comments that abortion was worse than the Holocaust.
Speaking Wednesday at the Butter Cow unveiling for the 2022 State Fair, Pritzker said Bailey owes Holocaust survivors an apology for his comments:
“Why can’t Republicans just stand up and say what Darren Bailey said was wrong? Why can’t Darren Bailey just apologize? He’s twisted himself into knots first trying to explain what he said, then going back and saying he meant what he said. This is a guy who does not understand what it takes to be a leader of Illinois [who] frankly doesn’t understand he needs to apologize to the survivors of the Holocaust who are still among us in Illinois and to all of us who care about how the governor speaks about the choice, the very difficult choice that women need to make sometimes about their reproductive rights, and the awful, truly tragic, traumatic and one of the worst tragedies in the history of the US and that’s the Holocaust.
“What Senator Bailey said is offensive,” Pritzker added. “It’s offensive to me as someone who is Jewish, it’s offensive to me as someone who built a Holocaust museum with Holocaust survivors and it’s offensive to those survivors. He owes an apology to them. He especially owes an apology to those survivors and their families .”
Critics slammed Bailey’s remarks, however, the Republican candidate for governor stated that he would not apologize.
“The Jewish community themselves have told me that I’m right,” said Bailey during an interview with WSPY-FM, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Bailey did not name those leaders.
Last week, Pritzker released an ad highlighting the antisemitic comments made by Bailey during his 2017 run for a seat in the Illinois House.
“The attempted extermination of the Jews in World War II doesn’t even compare on a shadow of the lives that have been lost with abortions,” Bailey said.
The GOP candidate, recently endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police Chicago Lodge #7, responded to the backlash, stating that he, in no way, was “attempting to diminish the atrocities of the Holocaust and its stain on history.”