Ex-ADL chief: Trump’s ‘raise your hand’ gambit was deliberate, Nazi-style ‘fascist gesture’

Ex-ADL chief: Trump’s ‘raise your hand’ gambit was deliberate, Nazi-style ‘fascist gesture’

[link to www.timesofisrael.com]

Former Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman excoriated Donald Trump for urging his supporters at a weekend rally to raise their right hands and promise to support him, a gambit Foxman said evoked echoes of Hitler salutes from Nazi rallies in the 1930s and ’40s.

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“Let’s do a pledge. Who likes me in this room?” the Republican presidential candidate asked a large crowd Saturday in Orlando, Florida. “Raise your right hand: ‘I do solemnly swear that I — no matter how I feel, no matter what the conditions, if there’s hurricanes or whatever — will vote, on or before the 12th for Donald J. Trump for president.'” (Trump misstated the date of the Florida primary, which will be held on March 15.)


As the audience enthusiastically complied with his request, the candidate told them: “Don’t forget you all raised your hands. You swore. Bad things happen if you don’t live up to what you just did.”

For Foxman, who was born in Poland in 1940 and was saved from the Nazis by his Catholic nanny, watching Trump whip up his supporters in this fashion was extremely disturbing.

“As a Jew who survived the Holocaust, to see an audience of thousands of people raising their hands in what looks like the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute is about as offensive, obnoxious and disgusting as anything I thought I would ever witness in the United States of America,” he told The Times of Israel.