Ohio Republican forced to clarify statement after setting off multiple alarms with Holocaust remarks

An Ohio Republican who's sponsoring a "divisive concepts" bill that covers state schools is drawing criticism for her characterization of the Holocaust, and now she's refusing to comment on the topic.

House Bill 327 would change the way public school teachers would be allowed to present certain topics, and state Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur (R-Ashtabula) was asked by WEWS-TV earlier this month to comment on the financial aspect of the proposed legislation -- and she brought up the Holocaust.

"You should talk about these atrocities that have happened in history," Fowler Arthur told the station, "but you also do have an obligation to point out the value that each individual brings to the table."

The legislator then misstated the number of Jews executed by the Nazis and suggested Judaism was a race, and not a religion.

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"What we do not want is for someone to come in and say, 'Well, obviously the German government was right in saying that the Aryan race is superior to all other races, and therefore that they were acting rightly when they murdered hundreds of thousands of people for having a different color of skin,'" the representative said.

The TV station revisited the interview, which Fowler Arthur declined to record herself when prompted by Statehouse reporter Morgan Trau, and shared unedited portions of it with the Anti-Defamation League, the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Ohio Education Association, whose representatives were alarmed by the comments.

"There are moments in our history where there are not two sides to debate," said James Pasch, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. "There is a right side and a wrong side."

Pasch was alarmed that Fowler Arthur so drastically undercounted the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust, and said that showed how important education was to understanding history.

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"There's no baseline of even education there that six million Jews were systematically murdered and millions of others," Pasch said. "I can't think of a more important need or call out for the need of increased education about what happened."

Dahlia Fisher, of the Maltz Museum, was disturbed by the similarities between Fowler Arthur's remarks and Nazi propaganda.

"Judaism is not a race, it is a religion," Fisher said. "The significance of this is that Hitler and the Nazis were the ones that categorized the Jews into a race. I would say that if someone was to use that language today, it would be an act of antisemitism and a way to categorize Jews as an 'other' in our current times."

WEWS tried numerous times to contact Fowler Arthur for a follow-up comment, but she and her team refused a follow-up interview -- although she did post a link to a 2019 BBC article, "Being Black in Nazi Germany," on her personal Facebook page hours after the TV report aired with the comment, "Journalism has reached an all new low."

That post included another link to her legislative Facebook page where she complained about the way her remarks had been characterized.

"For those who are not aware, I am currently the joint sponsor of a bill trying to prevent teachers and professors from being able to indoctrinate children in our schools," Fowler Arthur wrote. "In modern times, when so many ‘journalists’ are effectively the unpaid spokesmen of the Far Left, I’m not really shocked this ended up with me being called a Nazi and a Holocaust Denier. I am a little shocked the quote being used to justify this was from me pointing out that the Nazis also killed people of different races and nationalities."

"Just to be clear: The Nazis were evil," she added. "They murdered millions of Jews. They murdered millions of other people too, which included thousands of people of different races, many of which were German citizens of African Descent, as I mentioned in my comments."

The TV station noted that Fowler Arthur had previously served on the state Board of Education but has never participated in public education as a student or parent, because she was homeschooled and did not attend college.