Priebus: No regrets that Trump excluded Jews from Holocaust statement

The White House chief of staff continued to defend Trump’s statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which did not mention the Jewish victims.

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said he has no regrets regarding President Donald Trump’s statement for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which did not mention the Jewish victims.

“The Final Solution was aimed solely at the Jews. The Holocaust was about the Jews. There is no ‘proud’ way to offer a remembrance of the Holocaust that does not reflect that simple, awful world historical fact. To universalize it to, quote, ‘All those who suffered,’ is to scrub the Holocaust of its meaning,” wrote Commentary magazine columnist John Podhoretz.

Several Jewish organizations also objected to the wording.

Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Priebus said that the Holocaust was “obviously a miserable time in history that we remember here at the White House and certainly will never forget the Jewish people that suffered in World War II. And obviously still incredible wounds that remain in a time in history that was of great, incredible, horrific magnitude. And everyone’s heart here is impacted by the memory of that terrible time.”

However, he stressed that he did not regret the statement.

“But why whitewash Jews from that statement?” the interviewer asked, to which Priebus replied, “I’m not whitewashing anything.”

“And obviously I think you know that President Trump has dear family members that are Jewish. And there was no harm or ill-will or offense intended by any of that,” he added.

“Everyone’s suffering in the Holocaust, including, obviously, all of the Jewish people affected and the miserable genocide that occurred, is something that we consider to be extraordinarily sad and something that can never be forgotten and something that if we could wipe it off of the history books, we could. But we can’t. And it’s terrible. I mean, I don’t know what more to tell you,” Priebus said.

Holocaust Denial?

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said the statement was a form of Holocaust denial and that omitting any mention of Jews had to be intentional.

“When you have the chief political adviser in the White House, Steve Bannon, who is connected with a news organization that traffics in white supremacy and anti-Semitism and they put out a Holocaust statement that omits any mention of Jews,” he declared, alleging that Breitbart News Network, of which Bannon was executive chair, is anti-Semitic.

Kaine pointed to the fact that two previous administrations always mentioned the Jews in connection with the Holocaust.

“The Final Solution was about the slaughter of Jews. We have to remember this. This is what Holocaust denial is. It’s either to deny that it happened or, many Holocaust deniers acknowledge, ’Oh yeah people were killed. But it was a lot of innocent people. Jews weren’t targeted.’ The fact that they did that and imposed this religious test against Muslims in the executive orders on the same day, this is not a coincidence,” Kaine charged, referring to Trump’s executive order banning the entry of immigrants from seven Muslims counties as a security procedure.

By: Aryeh Savir, World Israel News

HolocaustPriebusTim Kaine