Sean Spicer's outrageous comments denying, then defending, Hitler's gas chamber genocide to highlight the U.S. claim that Syria used chemical weapons backfired Tuesday, as he also admitted that "the goal for the United States is to destabilize Syria."
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The comments were part of a press conference Thursday where Spicer was attempting to justify the U.S. missile attack on Syria, where he referred to Nazi concentration camps as a "Holocaust center."
The press secretary went on to compare Adolf Hitler with Syria's Bashar al-Assad, “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II. You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons," said Spicer. "I think when you come to sarin gas, (Hitler) was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing."
The Anne Frank Center took to Twitter denouncing Spicer, demanding he be fired for his shocking anti-Semitic comments. "Trump how does it feel to have a press secretary who engages in Holocaust denial? Fire your national embarrassment."
However, in less than an hour, Spicer made three clarifications to his outrageous Nazi-supporting comments. “In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust," Spicer said. “I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”
It is common knowledge that Hitler and the Nazis used poison gas in the mass murder of Jews, LGBTs, communists and other marginalized groups during the Holocaust, from 1933 to 1945. In Auschwitz alone, the largest complex of camps, more than a million people were killed by the poison gas Zyklon B.
The total Nazi death toll included as many as six million Jews, nine million non-Jewish Soviet and Polish civilians, people with disabilities, Gypsies, political prisoners and LGBTs, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Spicer's statements come on the first day of Passover, the Jewish holiday commemorating the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. In January, President Donald Trump's statement commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day — marking the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet troops — made no reference to Jews.