Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), who recently gave former President Donald Trump a special award, denounced Trump on Monday for his recent dinner with antisemitic figures.
Klein was reacting to news of Trump’s private dinner at Mar-a-Lago with rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West, who brought along Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. West has made antisemitic statements for several weeks.
The ZOA leader was quoted in the New York Times on Monday:
“I am a child of survivors. I have become very frightened for my people,” Morton Klein, head of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, said on Monday, referring to his parents’ survival of the Holocaust. “Donald Trump is not an antisemite. He loves Israel. He loves Jews. But he mainstreams, he legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters. And this scares me.”
Klein told Breitbart News that he had been misquoted, and that he had said specifically that Trump had “legitimized the Jew-hatred of Ye and Nick Fuentes.”
He added:
In America where antisemitic Congressmembers like Rep[s] Omar, Tlaib, McCollum, Cori Bush and AOC are regaled and praised by Biden and Pelosi with no negative consequences for their Jew-hatred, we fear that antisemitism is being normalized with frightening prospects for the future. Not condemning these people only encourages more anti Jewish bigots to rear their ugly heads. I’m scared for my people.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this month, Klein and the ZOA gave Trump the rare Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion in appreciation for his accomplishments for U.S.-Israel relations and for the Jewish community.
Klein and the ZOA were close allies of the president during his administration. His statement Monday was more strident than a statement he issued Sunday, deploring Trump’s dinner while also calling on Democratic presidents to denounce antisemitic and racist Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, with whom they had met and shared public platforms. Klein also noted that President Joe Biden had praised antisemitic Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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