WHITE HOUSE PRESS Secretary Sean Spicer is once again the centre of a media storm this evening after apparently comparing Adolf Hitler favourably to Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad regarding the latter’s use of chemical weapons against his own people.
Speaking at a press conference this evening, Spicer said with regard to Assad:
“You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”
Hitler was leader of Germany when some eleven million people lost their lives during the Holocaust, many of them in the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps.
Spicer was speaking in an effort to condemn Russia’s ongoing support for al-Assad. US President Donald Trump last Friday launched a missile attack at a Syrian airfield that had earlier been the launchpad for a chemical attack on Syrian citizens that left 70 people dead.
Asked to clarify his comment, Spicer said that Hitler “was not using the gas on his own people the same way Assad is doing”.
In doing so, Spicer seemed to say that Hitler “brought them into the Holocaust centre, I understand that”.
If you can’t view this video, click here
Quite apart from the fact that huge numbers of the Jews that Hitler had killed were assimilated German citizens, his genocidal campaigns also targeted those with disabilities, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities.
This led to a second clarification from Spicer who said he wasn’t trying to “lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust”.
“I was trying to draw a contrast of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on innocent people,” he said.
The press conference served as something of a distraction from the Syrian situation with Russian premier Vladimir Putin earlier claiming that future chemical weapons ‘provocations’ will serve only to frame al-Assad.
“We have information from various sources that such provocations – I cannot call them otherwise – are being prepared in other regions of Syria, including in the southern outskirts of Damascus, where they are again planning to throw some kind of substance and accuse Syrian official authorities of using it,” Putin said at a televised press conference.
He said Russia was set to appeal to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and “call on the international community to thoroughly investigate such incidents”.
The Russian leader insisted that reports over last week’s suspected chemical attack in that killed dozens of people in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun was reminiscent of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, justified by the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction.
“This ended with the country’s destruction, with the growth of the terrorist threat and the appearance of the Islamic State on the international stage, no more, no less,” Putin added.
With © – AFP, 2017
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say