As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintained silence over the U.S. president’s having equated neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members with the leftist counterprotesters who came under deadly attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, the prime minister’s hand-picked communications minister declared that Israel’s relations with the White House take precedence over condemning Nazis. [...]
“We need to condemn anti-Semitism and any trace of Nazism, and I will do what I can as a minister to stop its spread,” said Kara. “But Trump is the best U.S. leader Israel has ever had. His relations with the prime minister of Israel are wonderful, and after enduring the terrible years of Obama, Trump is the unquestioned leader of the free world, and we must not accept anyone harming him.”
Even for Israel, where Beyond Belief is another name for the place all of us live in all the time, there seems something impossible, something bordering on science fiction, about this country lending a home to, well, Nazi denial. [...]
And this is the same Richard Spencer who praised Trump for aiding in the “de-Judaification” of the Holocaust by omitting any mention of Jews from his statement marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. [...]
But the interview was far from the only instance of an abhorrent phenomenon in an Israel under the influence of Donald Trump. It is the rise of Nazi denial – the desire among certain political and media figures associated with Netanyahu to curry favor with the U.S. president by downplaying or dismissing the dangers of the KKK, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who took part in the violence in Charlottesville.
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