Rahm Emanuel: If You Can’t Denounce Piker, You Can’t Condemn Charlottesville

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Arena,” former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, former Obama Chief of Staff, and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said that if you can’t denounce Hasan Piker, “you clearly can’t attack people who go around chanting the Jews will not replace us”, although he said the issue is not just a problem within the Democratic Party.

Emanuel said he would go on Hasan Piker’s show “So I can give him a two-by-four upside his head, because of what he said.”

He added, “You also have a person who thinks 9/11 is okay. It’s not okay. America didn’t invite this. America has its problems, but it didn’t invite this, and it’s not right. And so, yeah, I’d go on, because I think — I’d give him a lesson in what he is perpetuating and the advocacy and the rhetoric of what he’s doing. He needs to be challenged on it. And anybody associated with that rhetoric needs to disassociate with him, because if it was any other group in America, any other group, people would be worked up in a tizzy, appropriately. And in a period of time of not just raising — rising antisemitism, also divisiveness in America, you have a person — and if you can’t say it about him, you clearly can’t attack people who go around chanting the Jews will not replace us and have a president of the United States saying, there are good people on both sides. So, when it comes to this, I’m an equal opportunity jerk. I’m unacceptable to it. And what he said the other day, I think I’m glad he said it, Piker, because it’s out front that, somehow, that we invited the violence against ourselves.”

He added, “It’s not about in the Democratic Party, given what Tucker Carlson is saying and given what others have said…it’s a larger issue, given what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, and people chanting, Jews will not replace us, it’s not a Democratic Party problem. … That’s a convenient political way of just kind of boxing it. There is a larger thread, when you have Gov. Shapiro (D), whose house, where he lives, the Tree of Life synagogue, when we were — Amy and I were overseas in Japan, somebody spray-painted a Nazi insignia on our home. You have Colorado, you have here in D.C. at the embassy. How many more examples would you like me to give across the board? So it’s not a party problem. This is a problem where you have 75%, according to the FBI, all religious-based violence is based to 2% of the population. And if you segregate it as somehow this is political or partisan, you’re actually allowing it a pass.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett