Senator Bill Nelson (D, Fla.) testifies during a hearing about legislative proposals to improve school safety in the wake of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 14, 2018. (Joshua Roberts/REUTERS)

Senator Bill Nelson, currently locked in a tight reelection race with Florida Republican governor Rick Scott, appeared to compare the current political climate in the U.S. to that of pre-genocide Rwanda at a weekend campaign event.

“When a place gets so tribal that the two tribes won’t have anything to do with each other . . . that jealousy turns into hate,” the Florida Democrat said Sunday in a campaign appearance with California senator Kamala Harris at the Covenant Missionary Baptist Church in Florida City. “And we saw what happened to the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. It turned into a genocide. A million-people hacked to death within a few months. And we have got to watch what’s happening here.”


The Rwandan genocide, considered one of the worst mass killings in history, erupted after the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana in April 1994, when ethnic Hutu extremists killed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsis in a 100-day period.

Nelson campaign spokesman Dan McLaughlin denied that the senator was comparing the the two situations in a statement.

“He wasn’t likening the current political climate in America to what was happening right before the Rwandan genocide,” McLaughlin said. “Senator Nelson and his wife, Grace, have spoken about events in Rwanda for years, because of his wife’s personal relationships there and his own trip to the country. He uses Rwanda as an extreme example of what could happen when a nation becomes totally divided.”

Nelson’s comment came after a week of threats and political violence across the country. Last week, a right-wing extremist mailed a string of pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Trump before being apprehended in Florida. And on Saturday, a shooter with a history of anti-Semitism opened fire at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, leaving eleven dead.

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