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TWO political advertisements comparing US President George W. Bush to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler have drawn outrage from Bush's Republican Party and anger from prominent Jewish groups. The two ads were among 1500 entries in a contest affiliated with the left-of-centre, Internet-based advocacy group, with the winner to be announced on January 12, but they are not among the 15 finalists. The first commercial shows pictures of Hitler making a speech, with written subtitles like 'I believe I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator'. The final sentence under the genocidal leader is 'God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them', before Bush's picture replaces it above the words 'and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did'. 'SOUND FAMILIAR?' asks the ad. The second commercial wraps up images of Nazi forces with Hitler giving the Nazi salute while a crowd bellows 'Sig Heil' - and then Bush's picture replaces Hitler's. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the Anti-Defamation League have sharply denounced the ads, while the Republican National Committee has demanded that MoveOn apologize. Wes Boyd, the president of the Voter Fund, which is running the contest, countered in a statement e-mailed to AFP that the commercials slipped through the group's vetting process. 'We agree that the two ads in question were in poor taste and deeply regret that they slipped through our screening process. In the future, if we publish or broadcast raw material, we will create a more effective filtering system,' he said. The flap echoes anger from opposition Democrats when Republicans visually linked Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Senator Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in ads ahead of the November 2002 mid-term elections. MoveOn is the brainchild of two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who founded the group in September 1998 out of frustration and anger at the attention paid to the
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