German magazine slammed for Trump ‘Nazi salute’ cover

“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,” declared the Simon Wiesenthal Center of a German magazine cover showing Trump as a Nazi.

Last week’s cover of a popular German news magazine depicting US President Donald Trump draped in the American flag while giving a stiff-armed Nazi salute is drawing sharp criticism from a prominent Jewish group.

Stern magazine’s illustration is part of a cover story headlined “Sein Kampf,” which translates as “His Struggle” and is a play on Adolf Hitler’s infamous “Mein Kampf.”

The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has been “outspoken in criticizing President Trump for failing to make a distinction between Nazis and KKK protesters and those who opposed them,” weighed in on the issue. “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,” declared Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, Dean and Founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Associate Dean and Director of Global Social Action. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is the leading Jewish human rights organization and was named in honor of the late Nazi-hunter.

“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 rabbis charged.

“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.

“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.

By: AP and World Israel News Staff

GermanyMedia BiasNazisSimon Wiesenthal Center