House Republican leaders called on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to “take action” against Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Sunday after Tlaib said that thinking about the Holocaust gave her “kind of a calming feeling” in part because in its aftermath, the Palestinians helped create “a safe haven for Jews.”

Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman to be elected to Congress, made the comments while discussing the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians during an appearance on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery.”

“There’s always kind of a calming feeling, I tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people’s passports,” Tlaib said on the podcast’s most recent episode, published Friday. “And, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And, I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways, but they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them.”

Many Jewish refugees migrated to areas now considered parts of the Palestinian territories after the Holocaust, although historians have pointed out that modern migration to the region had started decades earlier.

“There is no justification for the twisted and disgusting comments made by Rashida Tlaib just days after the annual Day of Holocaust Remembrance,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said in a statement. “More than six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust; there is nothing ‘calming’ about that fact.

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