“While Jewish families across America celebrate Passover, the chief spokesman of this White House is downplaying the horror of the Holocaust. Sean Spicer must be fired, and the President must immediately disavow his spokesman’s statements. Either he is speaking for the President, or the President should have known better than to hire him.”
Democratic congressman John Yarmuth, from Kentucky, tweeted: “There’s no excuse for Holocaust denial from the White House. It’s an insult to all Americans, Jewish or not, as well as the Nazis’ victims.”
Asked to clarify the remarks, he added: “I think when you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing.”
A reporter in the room shouted that Jews had been targeted. Stuttering and gesticulating, Spicer stumbled on: “Thank you, I appreciate that. There was not in the – he brought them into the Holocaust centres – I understand that. But I’m saying in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down into the middle of towns.
“So, the use of it, I appreciate the clarification. That was not the intent.”
More than six million Jews were murdered, along with large numbers of Gypsies, gay people, political dissidents and others, during the Holocaust. Many were killed in gas chambers with the use of chemical gas agents such as Zyklon B. It is unclear if Spicer’s reference to “Holocaust centres” was to the gas chambers or to concentration camps or something else.
The statement came on the first day of Passover, the Jewish holiday which commemorates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. The holiday is one of the holiest days in Judaism and has been used a metaphor for the oppression that Jews faced throughout history, including under Nazi Germany.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/11/sean-spicer-hitler-chemical-weapons-holocaust-assad
Democratic congressman John Yarmuth, from Kentucky, tweeted: “There’s no excuse for Holocaust denial from the White House. It’s an insult to all Americans, Jewish or not, as well as the Nazis’ victims.”
Asked to clarify the remarks, he added: “I think when you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing.”
A reporter in the room shouted that Jews had been targeted. Stuttering and gesticulating, Spicer stumbled on: “Thank you, I appreciate that. There was not in the – he brought them into the Holocaust centres – I understand that. But I’m saying in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down into the middle of towns.
“So, the use of it, I appreciate the clarification. That was not the intent.”
More than six million Jews were murdered, along with large numbers of Gypsies, gay people, political dissidents and others, during the Holocaust. Many were killed in gas chambers with the use of chemical gas agents such as Zyklon B. It is unclear if Spicer’s reference to “Holocaust centres” was to the gas chambers or to concentration camps or something else.
The statement came on the first day of Passover, the Jewish holiday which commemorates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. The holiday is one of the holiest days in Judaism and has been used a metaphor for the oppression that Jews faced throughout history, including under Nazi Germany.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/11/sean-spicer-hitler-chemical-weapons-holocaust-assad
