Trump and the Jews: White Supremacy influences Holocaust Remembrance Day Statement

As many of us witnessed, the Trump White House failed the Jewish people on Holocaust Remembrance Day by excluding Jews and anti-Semitism from their official statement.  When confronted with this, White House spokesperson Hope Hicks pointed to an article about the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.  Basically, the White House “All Lives Mattered” the Jews.  For Trump supporters who excuse this omission, I point you to the Obama supporters who excused his actions in the UN.  You are two sides of the same party-first coin.  Trump is not a friend to the Jews and is actively playing to his staunchly supportive white-supremacist base.  As foreshadowed in Trump’s inauguration speech, I predict the Trump administration will eventually withdraw financial and military support for Israel. They’ve already backtracked on moving the embassy to Jerusalem.  Jewish Trump voters will continue to be blindsided, though their blindness is by choice.  Now the Trump administration is attempting to lay blame for their lame statement on a Jewish White House employee who had family that perished in the Holocaust.  As Jews, we know better than this and this scapegoating of their anti-Semitic statement (yes, that’s what it was) on a Jew is doubly disturbing.

Below is how the official White House statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day should’ve read if it had been, in fact, written by a Jew:

On January 27, 1945, the Allies, who bravely and victoriously fought against the Nazi regime, liberated the survivors at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.  When Soviet soldiers entered the death camp in Poland, they witnessed people who were barely alive.  People who had been brutalized and starved.  People whose family members were exterminated on a whim by the evil that comprised the Nazi philosophy.  How they were able to survive such horrors is miraculous and a testament to the strength of the human spirit.  On this day annually, we must stop what we’re doing to consider the atrocities experienced by the people targeted by the Nazi regime:  homosexuals, the disabled, the Roma, dissenters, and most of all, the Jews.

While there were many individuals and groups targeted by the Nazis, it was the Jews and only the Jews who were the subject of the Nazi’s “Final Solution,” a campaign to exterminate the Jewish people to eliminate their existence on this planet.  And they almost succeeded.  The Nazi regime erased half of the world’s Jewish population.   The Jewish people were targeted then as they continue to be targeted today, through propaganda and acts of violence based on anti-Semitism steeped in fictitious and evil lies used to demonize one of the world’s oldest and most enduring cultures.  The fact that Israel, the only Jewish country in the world, is targeted by so much viciousness and singled out by the UN and other groups on a regular basis demonstrates that the evil of anti-Semitism is relentless. Silence in the face of this continued campaign to demonize Jews is inexcusable and it is our duty as human beings to recognize it for what it is and collectively cry, “Never again.”