Republicans block condemnation of Trump’s Holocaust remarks

A resolution, backed by 100 Democrats, calling upon Trump to acknowledge that the Nazi regime targeted the Jewish people during the Holocaust, has been blocked. 

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has procedurally blocked a resolution backed by at least 100 Democrats that would have condemned President Donald Trump for not having explicitly mentioned Jewish victims in his official statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The resolution, sponsored by House Democratic Conference Chairman Joe Crowley of New York, “calls on all the executive branch agencies and entities, including the White House, to affirm that the Nazi regime targeted the Jewish people in its perpetration of the Holocaust.”

“It is beyond belief that President Trump would allow a Holocaust remembrance statement to go out under the banner of his White House that did not discuss the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people,” said Crowley.

“The Holocaust targeted Jewish people and the Trump administration must acknowledge this fact.”

Shortly after controversy had arisen over the statement, officials in the White House, including Trump’s Chief of Staff Reince Preibus, defended the statement by touting its general inclusivity of all Holocaust victims.

Trump’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer had also revealed that a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors helped write the statement.

“The statement was written with the help of an individual who is both Jewish and a descendant of Holocaust survivors,”  Spicer said.

A report in Politico confirmed that the author was Trump’s aide Boris Epshteyn, a Russian-Jewish immigrant and a descendant of Holocaust survivors.

By: Jonathan Benedek, World Israel News