In a speech marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, Mr Trump said those who would deny that six million Jews were killed by Germany's Nazi leadership during the Second World War "are an accomplice of this disgusting evil". "He told the story of Holocaust survivor and political activist Elie Wiesel, who died previous year, and slammed Holocaust deniers".
But Tuesday's comments were unequivocally pro-Jewish, and Trump, speaking from the U.S. Capitol, railed against "dangerous anti-Semitism".
"We've seen it on university campuses and in the public square, and in threats against Jewish citizens", the president said, adding that antisemitism was at its most "sinister...when terrorists attack the Jewish community and when Israel is threatened with total and complete destruction".
Trump's proclamation condemned the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews as well as other minorities. Kushner, the president's son-in-law, has acted as Trump's top adviser on Israel, helping write his first speech on Israel during the campaign.
"Every young person holding a placard to protest my parents and myself, I challenge you now: go away and look at everything I have said and written in the last 46 years of my life and find one sentence that is anti-Semitic", he declared before he left. "And I will always stand with our great friend and partner the state of Israel", Trump said.
On April 11, press secretary Sean Spicer fumbled in a briefing while trying to compare Syrian President Bashar Assad to Hitler.
Leaders renew campaigns after local elections boost Tories
There, the Conservatives' Andy Street, formerly the director of upmarket department store chain John Lewis, claimed a narrow win. In many Labour held marginals it would only take 25-40% of the UKIP vote to go to the Conservative candidate for him/her to win.
People walk in front of a gate with the words "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets you free), in the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz as thousands of people, mostly youth from all over the world gather for the annual "March of the Living" on Holocaust Remembrance Day in Oswiecim, Poland, April 24, 2017.
President Trump is scheduled to speak at the Holocaust Memorial Museum's National Day of Remembrance on Tuesday at 11:00 a.m.
There have also been questions about whether some in Trump's orbit have anti-Semitic ties.
The Trump administration came under fire in January for its statement marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day that omitted a specific mention of Jews.
Most in attendance applauded following the speech.
The remark, which Mr Spicer had made days after a chemical attack in Syria killed scores of civilians, ignored Hitler's use of gas chambers to kill Jews. In the opening of his address to a joint session of Congress on February 28 he said: "Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week's shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms".





Comments