Posted on 01/27/2025 8:56:14 AM PST by Miami Rebel
(JTA) — Days after stoking controversy by delivering what some believed to be a Nazi salute and making Holocaust jokes, Elon Musk appeared at a campaign rally for a far-right German political party to tell supporters to be proud of their heritage.
Musk’s appearance Saturday at the rally for Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, was unadvertised and came by video. It was the second time in as many weeks that the world’s richest man and close ally of new U.S. President Donald Trump has appeared alongside Alice Weidel, the party’s candidate for chancellor in Germany’s Feb. 23 election.
During his speech, Musk told a cheering crowd of 4,500 that he believed the AfD was “the best hope for Germany.” He also alluded to Germany’s history.
“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said.
He added that he believed the party could “preserve” and “protect” German culture, which he implied was facing a threat.
“It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said.
The rally is set to be AfD’s largest before next month’s elections, in which the party is polling in second place. The rally took place in Halle, the eastern Germany city where a far-right extremist attacked a synagogue on Yom Kippur in 2019.
Musk’s appearance at the rally comes days after he twice made a straight-armed gesture at a Trump inauguration event that ignited comparisons to the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute. After some arbiters of antisemitism said they would give him the benefit of the doubt, Musk posted a series of Holocaust jokes on X, the social network that he owns.
The entire saga followed Musk’s recent endorsement of AfD, which has found increasing traction in Germany with its anti-immigrant, pro-Russia and anti-European Union platform. Some of its politicians have also downplayed the Holocaust, and German courts have fined one of its regional leaders, Björn Höcke, multiple times for using the Nazi-era phrase “Alles für Deutschland,” or Everything for Germany.
Musk hosted Weidel for a livestream on X earlier this month. During the call, Weidel falsely claimed that Adolf Hitler was a communist in a bid to distance AfD’s politics from the Nazis’.
Musk’s appearance at the AfD rally caused at least some Jews who said they had previously given Musk the benefit of the doubt to condemn him.
“There I was. Joining the chorus calling the left ridiculous because of a poorly orchestrated arm gesture. And then this happens, coupled with a few Holocaust zingers on Twitter in terrible taste, and now, I’m not so sure who is ridiculous, or if in fact we are all being played,” Blake Flayton, a pro-Israel influencer, posted on Instagram.
Hi there, fanboy!
I truly don’t care what you label AfD: communist, socialist, far-right, far-left, or antidisestablishmentarian. The fact is that it parrots Jew-hating themes of Naziism, and the fact that Musk promotes it is disgusting.
Happy now?
See above.
Educating young Germans of the ugly part of their nation’s past is not shaming, humiliation or casting guilt. I think it’s fair to say that most of these kids relate more to the victims of Naziism than to the perpetrators.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana
I’d love for you to share them. All I’ve been seeing are clips where it is evident that the subject is waving, not saluting.
But even stipulating that Musk made the gesture innocently, the fact that he saw fit to playfully use Nazi references in an attempt at a humorous rebuttal reinforces his reputation as a profoundly unserious and antisocial man. But that might just be his autism talking.
Barack Obama spent 20 years taking in Jeremiah Wright’s church of hate. Anti-Semitic rants were a regular part of his Sunday morning drill. Louis Farrakhan got a “lifetime achievement” award from this same Church.
And yet Obama was wildly popular in Germany.
Why the impulse to grasp at whataboutism?
There’s no “whataboutism” about it at all. The real anti-Semitic race grifter is Obama, not Elon Musk. The real growth of anti-Semitism in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe) came from pandering to Obama’s obsession with welcoming a migrant invasion from some of the most anti-Semitic countries on the face of the Earth.
This is what they should be worrying about.
I didn’t vote for Obama and he’s no longer a visitor to the White House.
He’s just being used by you as a deflection.
Do I know any Germans? You mean other than my friends and relatives?
Meine Vorfahren sind Deutsch. Ich hatte Deutsch als kleines Kind zu Hause gesprochen. Ich hab’ zweimal in Deutschland gewohnnt. Ja, ein Paar Deutsche kenne Ich schon.
“You may think it best that the Germans think of themselves as unredeemable.”
You have a beautiful imagination. I have many German friends.
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You didn’t actually disagree with me. Perhaps your German friends are your friends because they think themselves unredeemable. That’s why you like them.
(They would be the inverse of a gentile making friends with a self hating jew—because said jew is self hating—why? Perhaps such self hatred has its charm. Like the way chinese men once liked chinese women who bound their feet to make their feet small.)
In general I would say self hatred does not serve anyone—least of all its practitioner.
Good Lord, but you do have a febrile imagination. You have constructed a detailed ecosystem where you not only completely understand people you’ve never met and but also can even, with great confidence, reveal their hidden psychological underpinnings.
Germans comfortable in their own skins? They must be self-hating!
Germans comfortable in their own skins?
Were you not accusing Musk of calling on Germans to be comfortable in their own skins?
I come from a German great grandfather that came to the US as a stowaway in the late 1800’s... I also come from Scottish immigrants from way back in the 1700’s ... and one of their off-spring was scooped up and sent in on D-day.. took a head shot of shrapnel ... had the presence of mind to keep his thumb in the air and was recovered by the medics on the beach...
He got a metal plate installed to keep his brain in his head ... bandaged up and sent on to the battle of the bulge ...
I remember as a child watching my dearest grandmother talk about what happened to her first born son... I am really tired of lectures from people in Miami on what people should or should not think!
Gott im himmel!
1. You’d be surprised how indifferent I am to your pedigree.
2. You’re imagining things if you think I’ve exerted any effort to persuade you what to think or not to think.
(By the way, do you believe that there are no Germans in Miami, a city of over 2 million? Are you for real?)
There are Germans all over America…. One just killed a border patrol officer up in socialist Vermont this t week.. recently I have heard about a newbie here on a visa, from Germany. Despises President Trump and advocates shredding our constitution..
You have an agenda.. and you are attempting to influence.
Oh, perhaps you are without a pedigree? Or maybe you hold yourself out like that pig in Animal Farm?
World War II was nearly a century ago. If past guilt is what is preventing Germans from having pride in and defending their culture and heritage, then that guilt needs to be abandoned.
Joke post?
Please show me any country on earth that has not committed massacres against one group or the other in their history if you go back and dig into it enough.
In WW II alone Stalin murdered millions in Russia and Russia was allies with America then.
America and Britain slaughtered thousands of women and children in Dresden ( look up Bomber Harris), and the Japanese carried out terrible massacres in China.
Germany cannot continue to bow down to other countries because of Hitler.
Why is that Americans are so insistent that Germans need to be shielded from their history??
A weak pathetic response.
Try again.
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