Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election, told NBC News’ Meet the Press on Sunday morning that President Donald Trump was guilty of Holocaust denial.
Kaine based his argument on the complaint that Trump’s statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day did not specifically mention Jews. He also took a swipe a Breitbart News.
He said:
I think all of these things are happening together. When you have the chief political adviser in the white House, Steve Bannon who is connected with a news organization that traffics in white supremacy and antisemitism [sic] and they put out a Holocaust statement that omits any mention of Jews. Remember, remember earlier administrations have done these statements and the first thing you do is you pull up what earlier statements have said and the earlier staples, president Obama, and President Bush with the slaughter of Jews and the final solution was about the slaughter of Jews. We have to remember this. This is what Holocaust denial is. It’s either to deny that it happened or many Holocaust deniers acknowledge oh, yeah, people were killed and it was a lot of innocent people, Jews weren’t targeted and the fact that they did that and imposed this religious test on Muslims in the executive orders on the same day is not a coincidence.
On Saturday, Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, chided Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League for making a similar complaint to Kaine’s — though even Greenblatt did not use Kaine’s extreme language. Lauder said:
“It does no honor to the millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust to play politics with their memory.
“Any fair reading of the White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day will see it appropriately commemorates the suffering and the heroism that mark that dark chapter in modern history.
“There are enough real anti-Semitism and true threats facing the Jewish people today. Our community gains nothing if we reach a point where manufactured outrages reduce public sensitivity to the real dangers we confront.”
Most Jews, and the State of Israel, observe the memory of the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah, which occurs in spring, according to the Hebrew calendar.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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