The president issued a statement Friday to “remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust.”
“It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror,” he said.
President Trump issues statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day pic.twitter.com/SIaiEdPeUM
— Dorey Scheimer (@DoreyScheimer) January 27, 2017
Yet nowhere in the statement did Trump actually mention the Jewish people, and the omission didn’t go unnoticed. Here is a statement from the Anti-Defamation League:
1/2 @WhiteHouse statement on #HolocaustMemorialDay, misses that it was six million Jews who perished, not just 'innocent people' pic.twitter.com/OXiFqcPi4V
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 27, 2017
2/2 Puzzling and troubling @WhiteHouse #HolocaustMemorialDay stmt has no mention of Jews. GOP and Dem. presidents have done so in the past. pic.twitter.com/BvZVVoPUSi
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 27, 2017
The omission is troubling because, as my colleague Juliet Kleber recently pointed out, the Trump administration “entertains a degree of anti-Semitism unparalleled in recent American administrations,” most notably in the figure of Steve Bannon, whose former website Breitbart has been accused of running anti-Semitic articles.