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ADL’s Greenblatt: Trump’s Rhetoric Emboldens Anti-Semites

Donald Trump’s candidacy and his rhetoric on the campaign trail has presumably led to the uptick in racism and anti-Semitism, ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said on Monday.

“I’m not saying that Donald Trump is a racist or anti-Semite but the racists and anti-Semites have come out of the woodwork during this political season to support him,” Greenblatt told CNN’s Deborah Feyerick in an interview broadcast on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon.

“This is not normal,” the Anti-defamation League’s chief said, pointing to George Wallace’s run for president in the 1960’s as a similar example of “racism being inserted into the public conversation in a presidential election.”

Earlier this month, the ADL formed a task force to combat hate speech and anti-Semitic harassment towards Jewish journalists covering the 2016 presidential campaign.

In March, Greenblatt suggested that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s rhetoric and his failure to outright condemn white supremacists and the KKK has mainstreamed their racist views into the political conversation. “The fact of the matter is, his failure to reject and repudiate their racism, their anti-Semitism, and their hate, with the same clear terms that he has used in the presidential debates, that he has used in his rallies, or that he has used about the other candidates, that lack of symmetry in the way he talks about white supremacists and racists, has helped to mainstream them into this political conversation,” Greenblatt said during an interview with Israel’s Channel 1. “And that’s what we find so problematic.”

Trump released a laconic statement last month, saying, “Anti-Semitism has no place our society, which needs to be united, not divided.” And his Jewish advisor, Jason Greenblatt, stressed that Trump has no time on his busy schedule to keep denouncing anti-Semitism.

“People are trying to lay at Donald’s feet Twitter trolls — we don’t even know how many there are. And I guess if somebody did a scientific study there are plenty of Twitter trolls who support Hillary [Clinton],” Greenblatt said in an interview with WNYC, published on Tuesday. “I recognize that people think that he should do more and I’ve had many conversations with different people about that. He’s running a campaign, he has a business to run, I don’t think it’s fair for me to constantly go to him and say, ‘Well, this unknown Twitter troll said this, can you make a statement?'”

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