Former Vice President Joe Biden blamed President Donald Trump for antisemitic violence, including several recent synagogue shootings, in an essay published on Medium on Wednesday afternoon.
Biden did not repeat his claim that Trump referred to neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the Charlottesville riot in 2017 as “very fine people.” (Breitbart News confronted Biden at the Iowa State Fair this summer about his habit of misquoting Trump, who actually condemned the neo-Nazis and white supremacists “totally.”)
However, Biden still claimed Wednesday that Trump drew “moral equivalence” between the right-wing extremists and those marching peacefully against them.
That, too, is wrong: Trump condemned violent people on both sides, but praised non-violent protesters, including those on the left.
Biden drew a direct connection between Trump’s (falsely) alleged “moral equivalence” and violence against Jews:
Yet, after Charlottesville, instead of condemning a naked display of hatred, Trump assigned a moral equivalence between those streaming through the night with torches, chanting anti-Semitic bile — and the courageous neighbors and activists who stood against them. He gave license and safe harbor to white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and the KKK.
We have all seen what has followed. There’s a short line from those white supremacists in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” to the shooter at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last year, saying Jews “were committing genocide to his people.”
Biden added: “Since he took office, Trump has presided over a historic increase in hate crimes and biased-incidents targeting people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ Americans, and people of Jewish faith.”
That is also untrue: statistics show that hate crimes have increased since 2014, when Biden and President Barack Obama were in office.
That period coincides with the rise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which the Obama administration supported and which itself coincided with a decline in race relations, according to Gallup.
Killings related to violent extremists actually fell in the first two years of the Trump administration compared to the last two years of the Obama administration, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The most recent fatal attack on Jews occurred in Jersey City earlier this month and was allegedly carried out by two black gunmen, who reportedly had earlier ties to a radical black nationalist group called the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Two Jews and a Hispanic immigrant were killed at a kosher supermarket; Jersey City Police Detective Daniel Seals was also murdered.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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