A coalition of Jewish groups announced on Monday that they will no longer post on X, the social media site owned by right-wing billionaire and Donald Trump's Co-President Elon Musk, saying the platform has been overrun with antisemitic hate speech.
"Under the leadership of Elon Musk, X has reduced content moderation, promoted white supremacists, and re-platformed purveyors of conspiracy theories,” 15 Jewish groups, including the Union for Reform Judaism, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the American Conference of Cantors, wrote in a statement. “Musk himself has re-posted content that is antisemitic and xenophobic, promoting it to his millions of followers. The hateful posts on X are harmful to Jews and people of all faiths and no faiths.”
The announcement comes as Musk has refused to apologize for making a Nazi salute at Trump's Inauguration Day rally.
Musk has joked about the salute, writing in a post on X, "Don't say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming."
Musk's post references the evil Nazi leaders who helped Adolf Hitler carry out his genocide of the Jewish people.
It also comes after Musk made a surprise video address to a gathering of Germany's far-right Alternative für Deutschland party in which he said it is “good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything”; that “children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents”; and that there is “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that."
Of course, forgetting the past is the best way for history's worst horrors to repeat themselves.
That makes Musk's comments, which came days before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz—the Nazi concentration camp where Jews were systematically tortured and murdered in unspeakable ways—all the more horrific.
World leaders, as well as the few remaining Holocaust survivors, made that point.
"Contrary to [Musk's] advice, the remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society," Dani Dayan, chair of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, wrote in a post on X. "Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany."
"The words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about 'Great Germany' and 'the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes' sounded all too familiar and ominous," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote in a post on X. "Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz."
In the spirit of not forgetting the past, I want to share the story of two Holocaust survivors who are no longer with us: Eva and Henry Galler, my husband’s grandparents.
Eva survived the Holocaust after her father told her and her siblings to jump from a train that was taking them to the Belzec concentration camp in Poland. Eva’s siblings were shot and killed by the Nazis after jumping, but she survived and went on to assume a Christian name to survive the rest of the war.
Henry spent three years at a Siberian labor camp and later volunteered to fight for the Polish army against Germany.
Without their survival, my two beautiful daughters would not exist.
I think of Eva and Henry often when people like Musk and Trump and the Republican Party make comments dehumanizing large swaths of the population, and how horrified they both would be to witness it.
I hope you are horrified too. We cannot become numb to what is happening.
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