Democratic presidential contender and former Texas representative Beto O’Rourke. Photo: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton.

Jewish Republicans on Friday blasted Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke for a speech this week in which he compared President Donald Trump’s policies on immigration with the Third Reich in Nazi Germany.

Matt Brooks — Executive Director of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) — said in a statement that O’Rourke “should be embarrassed to resort to Nazi name-calling against President Trump instead of putting forward serious ideas for voters to consider.”

In a speech in Carroll, Iowa on Thursday, O’Rourke — a former Texas Congressman who is now running for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination — attacked Trump’s hardline positions on immigration, depicting them as a consequence of growing racism and prejudice in the US. The president, O’Rourke said, had called “Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals…He then went on to call asylum seekers animals and an infestation.”

Continued O’Rourke: “Now we would not be surprised if in the Third Reich other human beings were described as an infestation, as a cockroach or a pest that you would want to kill.”

The RJC’s Brooks retorted that such comparisons “demean the memories of the six million Jews lost in the Holocaust and the sacrifices of America’s Greatest Generation, who fought a bloody war to stop Nazism.” He underlined that the RJC “has said for many years that Holocaust imagery and Nazi comparisons have no place in today’s political discourse.”

Brooks continued: “We have spoken out whenever anyone, on either side of the political aisle, uses Holocaust imagery or Nazi comparisons to score political points. O’Rourke is the latest example and, we hope, the last.”

O’Rourke’s Nazi analogy this week follows similar comments from other leading Democratic politicians in recent months, including comparisons between President Trump and the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler offered up by Rep. Hank Johnson (GA) and Rep. James Clyburn (SC).