The Anti-Defamation League is scolding Elon Musk after coming to the billionaire titan’s defense earlier in the week.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt took to Twitter/X after Musk made a series of Holocaust jokes on Thursday in an attempt to make light of criticisms of his controversial crowd salute at President Trump’s inauguration celebration Monday.
“We’ve said it hundreds of times before and we will say it again: the Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it,” Greenblatt wrote and then tagged Musk: “The Holocaust is not a joke.”
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The official ADL account also shared the post.
The comment was in reaction to Musk posting on X a series of puns while referencing infamous Third Reich officers: “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 went viral for his vehement one-armed salute on Monday night on President Donald Trump‘s Inauguration Day, followed by his dismissive attempts to shrug off any criticism (“Frankly, they need better dirty tricks,” Musk wrote on X. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired”).
The ADL reacted to concerns about the gesture by giving Musk the benefit of the doubt: “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge. In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace.”
Interestingly, it’s a controversy that likely could have been over before it began had Musk simply given a serious reply to questions about the gesture when it first started surging on his social media platform following his speech. But the X chief’s reluctance to take questions and criticism with any degree of seriousness has now rolled the issue its third day of headlines and debate.
