Travis Okulski, the senior writer and second name on the masthead for Gawker Media’s car blog Jalopnik, compared the cold snap that has struck the East Coast with the Holocaust.
“I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this cold weather is far worse than the Holocaust,” Okulski wrote on Twitter at 9:41 a.m. on Thursday.
After making light of the murder of millions, it was business as usual for the writer: At 10:39 a.m., less than an hour later, Okulski followed up with a self-promotional link to a video of himself discussing the recent multi-million dollar sale of the original Batmobile.
Such remarks are clearly offensive and inappropriate, said Deborah Lauter, Civil Rights Director, Anti-Defamation League.
"While Mr. Okulski may have intended to make a joke in comparing the cold weather to the Holocaust, his Twitter post is clearly not funny," Lauter told FoxNews.com. "Such a trivialization of the Holocaust is deeply offensive to Jews, survivors and those who fought courageously against the Nazis in World War II."
Neither Gawker nor Okulski responded to FoxNews.com emails, but within an hour of writing that comment -- and quickly getting blowback from offended Twitter users -- Okulski deleted his comment. Good riddance, Lauter said.
"It appears that Mr. Okulski deleted his inappropriate tweet, and we hope that he will stay away from inappropriate invocations of the Holocaust on his Twitter feed and elsewhere in the future."
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