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Tiki Barber Creates Stir With Anne Frank Analogy

NFL running back Tiki Barber is catching heat in the media today for an article in Sports Illustrated, where the

former New York Giants football star compared himself to Holocaust victim Anne Frank.

In the SI article, Barber tells a story of hiding out with his girlfriend after breaking up with his then-pregnant wife. Barber and his girlfriend hid in his sports agent Mark Lepselter’s attic.

“Lep’s Jewish,” Barber said to Sports Illustrated. “And it was like a reverse Anne Frank thing.”

Barber has been under attack by media outlets since the article was released this week.

“In a world where nothing surprises me, where things get completely blown out of proportion, this only adds to the list,” Lepselter told ESPNNewYork.com in defense of his client. “[Tiki] was shedding light on going back to that time when he was literally trapped, so to speak, in my attic for a week. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Still, not everyone is taking Lepselter’s side on the matter.

“Holocaust trivialization continues to spread and finds new ways and expressions that shock the conscience,” Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a news release. “Tiki Barber’s personal behavior is his business. But our history and experiences are ours and deserve greater respect than being abused or perverted by Tiki Barber.

“The analogy to Anne Frank is not funny, it is outrageous and perverse. Anne Frank was not hiding voluntarily. Before she perished at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, she hid from the Nazis for more than two years, fearing every day for her life,” Foxman continued.

“The Frank family’s experiences, as recorded in Anne’s dairy, are a unique testimonial to the horrors of the Holocaust, and her life should never be debased or degraded by insensitive and offensive analogies.”

Yikes.

NFL owners might want to rethink this whole lockout thing and get these players back on the field asap, before something gets hurt.

Barber retired from the NFL in 2006, and spend four years as a NBC a correspondent for NBC’s “Today Show” and the network’s “Sunday Night Football.”

Tiki Barber, 36, announced in March that he’s making a comeback to the NFL this season (that is if there is a season).

Somewhere right now, Rick Ross is reading this story and putting the words “Anne Frank’s back” in his lyrics.