title:  Holocaust Survivor Says Donald Trump Reminds Him Of Hitler And That’s Terrifying
text: Donald Trump is literally scaring Holocaust survivors who are watching history repeat itself.There s a reason why the Bellamy Salute was abandoned by Americans in the 1940s. Fifty years after the salute was first used to pledge allegiance to the flag, Congress changed it because it had been adopted by the Nazis as a salute of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.As we all know, Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews by placing them in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, resulting in the mass murder of six million Jews during what became known as the Holocaust.If anyone knows what Nazi Germany and Hitler was like, it s Holocaust survivors, of which there only only a few hundred left.Abraham Foxman is one of those survivors. Though only a child at the time, Foxman was saved by his Catholic nanny. His parents, however, were forced to live in a ghetto. After being returned to his parents in 1944, Foxman and his parents came to the United States in 1950 to start fresh far away from war-torn Europe.But Foxman fears the United States is beginning to look a lot like Nazi Germany and it s mainly because of Donald Trump.After witnessing Trump call for thousands of supporters to raise their right hands to pledge allegiance to him during a recent rally in Florida, Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Times of Israel that the event disturbed him because it eerily reminded him of the Third Reich. As a Jew who survived the Holocaust, to see an audience of thousands of people raising their hands in what looks like the  Heil Hitler  salute is about as offensive, obnoxious and disgusting as anything I thought I would ever witness in the United States of America. We ve seen this sort of thing at rallies of neo-Nazis. We ve seen it at rallies of white supremacists. But to see it at a rally for a legitimate candidate for the presidency of the United States is outrageous. Foxman then discussed what Trump said after asking his audience to raise their hands. Don t forget you all raised your hands,  Trump said.  You swore. Bad things happen if you don t live up to what you just did. It is a fascist gesture,  Foxman said. He is smart enough   he always tells us how smart he is   to know the images that this evokes. Instead of asking his audience to pledge allegiance to the United States of America, which in itself would be a little bizarre, he s asking them to swear allegiance to him. He even threatens that if they don t, they will suffer and be punished. This is so over the top for a man who really doesn t come out of the underground. He is a man of the world. Even though he proclaims he doesn t know who David Duke was, or the other white supremacists, we know very well that he knows. So he s playing to an image. But despite his obscene extremism, which would have immediately disqualified candidates in the past, Trump is riding this wave of hate all the way to the Republican nomination. And the GOP establishment is so afraid of him actually being their nominee that there is talk of replacing Trump with someone else during the convention in July.As for Foxman, he is genuinely frightened of the possibility that right-wing extremism will keep growing and carry Trump to the White House. You can find some authoritarian, semi-fascist tinges in Southern politics during the segregationist era. But there s never been anything like this, and nothing on this scale. I am a Holocaust survivor and this made me quiver. What scares me is he s broken all these taboos and it s helped him. That frightens me. It frightens me that there are all these things that we ve worked so hard on, but one after another he breaks these taboos and the people applaud him and come back for more. Americans need to start taking this election seriously, because if Holocaust survivors are being reminded of one of the greatest evils this world has ever witnessed because of Trump s campaign to be the most powerful person on this Earth, we should be scared of him, too. It s time to wake up and end this nightmare.Featured Image: Twitter