Well before President Donald Trump's election the Democratic Party's self-proclaimed "democratic socialists" characterized anyone who opposes them as Nazis. The irony is that members of that contingent have more in common with Nazis than they would care to admit.

By embracing Islam as they promote "multiculturalism" and "tolerance," the democratic socialists and their enablers tolerate Islam's anti-Semitism. The House Democrats' feeble response to Rep. Ilhan Omar's anti-Semitic remarks -- a resolution that condemned bigotry but refused to mention either Omar or Islamist terrorism -- illustrates that misguided tolerance.

The Nazis understood the relationship between Islam and anti-Semitism so well that they tried to exploit it for their agenda of extermination. Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who had been agitating against Jews for a quarter of a century, broadcast anti-Semitic messages from Berlin with Hitler's support from 1941 until the end of World War II. Al-Husseini -- a close ally of the Muslim Brotherhood's founder, Hassan al-Banna, who admired Hitler -- told Arabs in the British Mandate of Palestine to "kill the Jews wherever you find them."

The Waffen-SS also had a special Muslim division, the Handschar, named after the German word for scimitar. Comprised of Bosnian Muslims, the Handschar division performed atrocities against Jewish civilians. Notably, it was the only division in the Waffen-SS allowed to have chaplains, with one imam presiding over each battalion.

Today, Hitler's Mein Kampf circulates throughout the Arab world without opposition from Muslim clerics.

The Nazis' euthanasia program, Aktion T4, was personally initiated by Hitler in 1939. Promoted as mercy killing, the program targeted the chronically ill, the elderly, the disabled, and the mentally incapacitated -- whether adults or children.

During Aktion T4's two years of operation, nearly 70,000 died from starvation, dehydration, lethal injection, and gassing. The Nazis built six gas chambers designed as showers to fool the victims. Though public pressure forced the Nazis to discontinue the program in 1941, it provided the basis for the murderous methods used in death camps.

The utilitarianism governing the use of tissue from aborted fetuses for such experiments as creating humanized mice -- usage favored by Democrats -- also governed the Nazis' use of prisoners for experiments in concentration camps. In one instance, doctors infected children with tuberculosis, removed their lymph nodes to determine the disease's progress, then executed their subjects.

America’s democratic socialists mimic the rationale of the Nazi program. Last March, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown -- a Democrat whom Planned Parenthood endorsed for re-election -- signed legislation allowing mentally ill patients to be denied food and water unless the patient had issued an advance directive to the contrary before becoming incapacitated. Previously, only caregivers with power of attorney could so decide. The bill received unanimous support from the Democrats in the lower house of Oregon's legislature.

In January, Oregon's Democrats introduced another bill expanding the state's law on medically assisted suicide to include any patient with an incurable disease or intolerable pain. On March 7, Maryland's lower house approved medically assisted suicide. That bill passed 74-66, with 73 of the chamber's 99 Democrats supporting it. Within days, members of the Democratic-Farmer Labor Party sponsored similar legislation in Minnesota's legislature.

Both ideologies embrace junk genetics and demand laws reflecting that embrace. Just as the democratic socialists promote a multiplicity of genders and encourage transsexuality in children, Nazis promoted pseudo-scientific racialist theories that circulated decades before Hitler emerged.

Between 1853 and 1855, a French aristocrat named Arthur de Gobineau wrote “An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races” which proposed that race provided the foundation for civilization. Gobineau argued that intermingling between what he called the "white" race -- which he viewed as superior -- with the "black" and "yellow" races would cause cultural disintegration. In 1899, the English philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain wrote in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century that Nordic and Teutonic peoples occupied the highest places among the ostensibly superior "Aryan" race, which found itself constantly at odds with Semites. Chamberlain even promoted anti-Semitic stereotypes in his work.

German anti-Semitism culminated intellectually with amateur anthropologist Hans Guenther, who divided Europeans into nine different races, with the "Nordics" first and "Negroes" last. Guenther also described Jews as "a thing of ferment and disturbance, a wedge driven by Asia into the European structure."

The democratic socialists and the Nazis even share the propensity to promote their agendas by fabricating incidents. Eight decades before Jussie Smollett's staged hate crime and the phony Steele dossier, the Nazis orchestrated an incident that plunged the world into war.

On Aug. 31, 1939, as relations between Germany and Poland rapidly deteriorated, Polish troops attacked and briefly occupied a German radio station near the Polish border to broadcast this message: "Attention! This is Gliwice. The broadcasting station is in Polish hands."

Gliwice was the Polish name for the then-German town of Gleiwitz. Gunfire could be heard during the broadcast. German police "overpowered" the troops and recaptured the station.

However, the Polish "troops" were members of the SS, who not only carried out the attack but dressed concentration-camp inmates in Polish army uniforms and killed them as "proof." One of the "troops" was an unmarried German farmer who sympathized with the Poles. The SS arrested him a day earlier and murdered him.

German radio carried news of the faux attack within hours. The next day, Sept. 1, Hitler declared war against Poland, beginning World War II.

The Gleiwitz "attack" belonged to a campaign of false flags that the SS and German military intelligence, the Abwehr, organized in late August 1939. The Abwehr paid such meticulous attention to detail that it provided the "troops" with Polish military equipment and military identification.

Nearly 80 years later, a swastika and the words, "Heil Trump" and "Fag Church" were found on the walls of St. David's Episcopal Church in Brown County, Ind. immediately after Trump's election. The graffiti was "among numerous incidents that have occurred in the wake of Trump’s Election Day win," wrote the Washington Post. But six months later, police arrested organist George Nathaniel Stang for vandalizing his own church.

"I suppose I wanted to give local people a reason to fight for good," wrote Stang, "even if it was a false flag."

Undergirding these parallels is the ultimate similarity: the identity politics that defines both democratic socialists and Nazis.

Just as the democratic socialists view women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims. and the LGBT community as needing special legal protection from powerful whites, Christians, and capitalists, the Nazis viewed "Aryans" as needing special legal protection from Jews, socialists, and capitalists. Just as the Nazis viewed "Aryans" as superior due to their race, so do democratic socialists view the marginalized as superior due to their victimization.

If racism means that ethnicity matters more than values, ideas, and ethics, then democratic socialists and Nazis are equally racist. Individual liberty and equality under the rule of law mean nothing. Retribution, however, means everything.

Former socialist Max Eastman tied the connecting knot between Marxism and National Socialism in his 1955 work, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. When applied to today’s democratic socialists, Eastman’s comments retain their power:

The backers of Hitler in Germany made the same mistake about the Nazi party that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd made about the Bolshevik party. Each group believed that this new brutal, rabid, monolithic fighting gang, on achieving power, would promote, as had been promised, its enlightened interests. Each found that in the growth and triumph of the gang, enlightened interest as such disappeared. The gang itself, the perpetuation of its blind fighting power, became the essential goal of the procedure.