Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has denounced an ad that compares President Trump to Adolf Hitler, saying that “comparing the president of the United States to Hitler is beneath contempt.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is a Jewish organization known for Holocaust research and remembrance, hunting Nazi war criminals, combating anti-Semitism, tolerance education, defending Israel, and operates a Museum of Tolerance.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper
“This ad, basically, accuses Donald Trump of being a Hitler-like figure, and frankly, by extension, it also puts his supporters, which I guess run into the tens and tens of millions of people I guess, into the same camp as if they are Nazis,” he said.
“That itself is an outrageous slander even in an outrageous political season.”
READ: Jewish groups demand Biden apologize for nazi comment
The 30-secoend ad, released by the liberal Jewish Democratic Council for America, features film footage of Hitler’s supporters waving Nazi flags, alongside Trump speaking at rallies and images of various unrelated white supremacy gatherings. The group’s executive director claimed in a statement that “American Jews feel less safe today than they did four years ago due to the rise of white nationalism and anti-Semitism under Donald Trump.”
Cooper pointed out he was at the White House last December when Trump signed an executive order protecting Jewish students on American campuses from anti-Semitism because Congress wouldn’t act.
“But to the core, he is no Nazi and for anyone to throw around the Hitler stuff that’s been going around now, not just on Donald Trump, but it has been going on in American politics just before November, unfortunately, in many cases,” he said. “But to elevate it to a point in which you are demonizing the president of the United States and his supporters as Nazis, that is just outrageous. And frankly, it just isn’t true.”
The controversial ad targets Jewish voters in the swing states of Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania ahead of the election. It also comes after Joe Biden compared Trump to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945, who was known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent anti-Semitism, which was evident in his publicly voiced views.
A Republican Jewish group countered that smear against Trump by saying, “The rule in debate is that if your only argument is to call your opponent a Nazi, you have no argument at all.”
Trump has increased his approval among American Jews to record numbers. In Israel, home to the worlds’s highest concentration of Holocaust survivors, Trump is extremely popular with streets, cities, bridges and train stations named after him.
Learn more about the Wiesenthal center here.
–Dwight Widaman | Metro Voice