New York, NY, October 17, 2005 ...The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has strongly condemned Zimbabwean President, Robert Mugabe, for comparing President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Hitler and Mussolini.

Speaking in Rome at the sixtieth anniversary meeting of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, Mr. Mugabe declared: "Must we allow these men, the two unholy men of our millennium, who in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed an unholy alliance, formed an alliance to attack an innocent country?"

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, deplored Mugabe's comments. "The world should be reminded that it is Robert Mugabe who is the brutal dictator," Mr. Foxman said. "This man starves and suppresses his own people. His shameful exploitation of Nazism and the Holocaust during his speech in Rome is the act of a demagogue who utterly disdains the values of tolerance and democracy."

Mr. Foxman added: "President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are democratically-elected leaders. To compare them with Hitler demeans and insults the terrible human suffering inflicted by the Nazis." 

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.