Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said the political divide in the United States reminds him of Rwanda before genocide, CNN reports.
"My wife is a personal friend of Jeannette Kagame, the First Lady of Rwanda, and that story of Rwanda is very instructive to us, because when a place gets so tribal that the two tribes won't have anything to do with each other . . . that jealousy turns into hate," Sen. Nelson told a Baptist church in Florida on Sunday, one day after a gunman killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
"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."
Some 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists in 1994. Hutu militias and civilians targeted political opponents and members of the minority Tutsi community in a civil war that ended when Tutsi forces defeated the extremists.
Nelson, who was stumping at the Covenant Missionary Baptist Church in Florida City is facing a re-election campaign against Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott.
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