Trump hits anti-Semitism, will ‘never forget’ Holocaust
WASHINGTON — President Trump strongly repudiated antiSemitism and pledged to “never forget” the Holocaust on Tuesday.
“This is my pledge to you: We will confront anti-Semitism,” Trump declared during an event held at the Capitol to mark the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s National Commemoration of the Days of Remembrance. “We will stamp out prejudice, we will condemn hatred, we will bear witness and we will act. As President of the United States, I will always stand with the Jewish people.”
The speech comes after a series of missteps by Trump and his senior staff on Jewish issues.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer was forced to apologize two weeks ago after comparing Adolf Hitler to Syrian strongman Bashar Assad, commenting that Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”
In reality, Hitler’s men used gas chambers to kill millions of Jews.
Spicer then attempted to clarify his statement, arguing that Hitler didn’t use “the gas on his own people” — although many Holocaust victims were German Jews. Spicer also referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.”
The White House also failed to mention Jews or anti-Semitism in a January statement marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And Trump faced criticism for staying silent during weeks of bomb threats against Jewish community centers (The main perpetrator later turned out to be a Jewish Israeli-American teenager), though Vice President Pence did visit a Jewish cemetery in Missouri after it was desecrated by vandals.
The President himself dismissed questions about why he hadn’t spoken out about the community center threats during his sole press conference earlier this year, telling a Jewish reporter to “sit down” and waving away the question as “not a fair question,” pointing out that his own daughter and son-in-law are Jewish.
There have also been questions about whether some in Trump’s orbit have anti-Semitic ties. Senior Trump aide Sebastian Gorka has been linked to a far-right Hungarian political party with Nazi ties, and stormed out of a Georgetown University event when students pressed him about those relationships.
Top Trump aide Stephen Bannon has also been accused of making anti-Semitic comments, and ran the Breitbart News website, a favorite of the alt-right.
On Tuesday, Trump carefully reading from remarks, said millions of “innocent people were imprisoned and executed by the Nazis without mercy — without even a sign of mercy.”
He promised to stand by Israel and the Jewish people and honored Holocaust survivor and human rights champion Elie Wiesel, who died last year.
“Even today, there are those who want to forget the past, and there are even those filled with such hate — total hate — that they want to erase the Holocaust from history. Those who deny the Holocaust are an accomplice to this horrible evil and we will never be silent. We just won’t,” Trump declared.
“We will never, ever be silent in the face of evil again.”