Spicer ‘must go’ over Hitler gaffe
SEAN Spicer was yesterday battling calls to step down as White House spokesman after suggesting Hitler did not use chemical weapons on his own people, unlike Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
During a Press briefing on Tuesday, Mr Spicer said: ‘We didn’t use chemical weapons in the Second World War. You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.’
When it was pointed out to him that the Nazis gassed millions of Jews to death, he compounded the mistake, which came during Passover week, by calling Hitler’s gas chambers ‘Holocaust centres’. He later said sorry and has since given multiple apologies but critics were unsatisfied, especially as President Trump was slow to condemn a wave of anti- Semitic attacks in the US in February.
Yesterday Steven Goldstein, executive director of the New York-based Anne Frank Centre, said that Donald Trump ‘has got to fire Sean Spicer’.
He said: ‘The problem with Sean Spicer and this administration is they don’t have the DNA of compassion. Any sixth grader knows what Sean Spicer didn’t know. Is he not very smart or is he not very competent? Either way he should not be the spokesman for the President of the United States’.
In Israel, Nachman Shai, a Zionist Union MP who chairs the USIsrael relations lobby in the Israeli parliament, said: ‘ The White House urgently needs a history teacher. Ignorance is not acceptable.
‘Hitler used chemical weapons of mass destruction in a large scale that human history hadn’t seen until then, and since then’.
Hours after the blunder, which drew gasps from the Washington Press corps, Mr Spicer went on CNN and apologised.
Yesterday he admitted he had ‘let the President down’.