Television personality Joan Rivers created a disturbance last week at a Costco wholesale superstore in California, likening the company to the Nazi party for not carrying her new book “I Hate Everyone… Starting With Me.”
Rivers caused a commotion by chaining herself to a shopping cart and shouting into a bullhorn. “They have no right; the First Amendment says I can sell my book,” she said.
“People should have the right to have the literature they want,” she told KTLA News. “This is the beginning of Nazi Germany.”
The discount chain allegedly banned her book because of two inappropriate parody quotes from Marie Antoinette and Wilt Chamberlain on the back cover of the book.
Police were called to put an end to the protest and the 79-year-old willingly left the premises.
Rivers had her own film crew in tow for her protest, said Burbank city spokesman Drew Sugars. “She had a whole entourage,” Sugars told The Los Angeles Times. “Sounds like a staged media event.”
The Times called the commotion “the best book publicity stunt of 2012 by far.”
Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, issued a statement saying, “While Joan Rivers may be right in criticizing Costco’s decision, there is simply no comparison between a private company’s choice not to sell a book and the policies of the Nazi regime that engaged in the systematic persecution and slaughter of millions of Jews and others during the Holocaust.”
“Such comparisons only serve to trivialize the Holocaust and are deeply offensive to Jews and other survivors, as well as those Americans who fought valiantly against the Nazis in World War II,” Foxman said.
The ADL then send a letter to Rivers, calling on her to retract the inappropriate remarks and to refrain from using Holocaust imagery in the future.