LOS ANGELES (Press Release) — Officials from the Simon Wiesenthal Center denounced the latest cover of Stern magazine, one of Germany’s most popular publications, that depicts US President Donald Trump doing a “Sieg Heil” salute while wrapped in an American flag. “This cover is a culmination of an increasingly alarming use of the Swastika and other Nazi symbols, depicting the elected President of the United States.”
“The Simon Wiesenthal Center has been outspoken in criticizing President Trump for failing to make a distinction between Nazis and KKK protesters and those who opposed them on the streets of Charlottesville,” declared Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action of the leading Jewish Human Rights NGO named in honor of the late Nazi hunter.
“There is no comparing the genocidal ideology of Nazism which would finish Hitler’s vision of a Jew-free world, the KKK, whose ideology would eliminate all Blacks and Latinos in the US and those who oppose these anti-Semites and racists,” they added.
“President Trump is fair game for serious criticism by the public and media at home and abroad. But the depiction of the president as a latter-day Hitler by a major German publication is untrue and beyond the pale,” Hier and Cooper said.
“Germans must surely know that by misappropriating the Swastika, the Sieg Heil, and other Nazi symbols and terms associated with Adolf Hitler, they belittle and becloud the crimes of the past, and add heat but shed no light or perspective on the serious struggles and disagreements that currently beset our democracy,” they concluded.
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Preceding provided by the Simon Wiesenthal Center