Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden accused President Donald Trump on Thursday of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism.
Biden made his remarks in a post on Medium a week after two gunmen stormed a kosher grocery in Jersey City, New Jersey, killing three civilians. They had killed a policeman earlier at a nearby cemetery.
The former vice president decried the “tide of hatred” that he said had fueled anti-Semitic mass shootings in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and California, and condemned the president for failing to take the lead in rooting out extremism and racism.
Citing Trump’s widely criticized response to 2017’s Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — the president said there fine people on “both sides” of the clashes there — Biden wrote that by declining to condemn “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.”
Such rhetoric, he said, gave “license and safe harbor to white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and the KKK.”
“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 said.
Stating that “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,” Biden said that at the end of Trump’s first year in office, “anti-Semitic incidents increased nearly 60%, the largest one-year increase since the Anti-Defamation League started keeping records 40 years ago.”
He also condemned the president for cutting funding for anti-extremism programs intended to counter the far-right.
“Hate didn’t begin with Donald Trump, and it won’t end with him. But this is a defining moment in our nation’s history,” Biden said, asserting that Americans are now “in a battle for the soul of this nation.”