By ALI SWENSON (Associated Press)
NEW YORK (AP) — A Democratic watchdog group has known as for a U.S. House committee to rescind an invite to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after the Democratic presidential candidate was filmed falsely suggesting COVID-19 may have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese folks.
Kyle Herrig, govt director of the Congressional Integrity Project, despatched a letter to Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, asking him to disinvite Kennedy from a listening to scheduled for Thursday after the candidate’s feedback at a New York City dinner final week prompted widespread accusations of antisemitism and racism.
A spokesperson for Jordan mentioned he plans to maneuver ahead with the listening to Thursday regardless of disagreeing with feedback Kennedy made.
In the filmed remarks first revealed by The New York Post, Kennedy mentioned “there is an argument” that COVID-19 “is ethnically targeted” and that it “attacks certain races disproportionately.”
“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he added. “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted at that or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential of impact for that.”
After the video was made public, Kennedy posted on Twitter that his phrases had been twisted and denied ever suggesting that COVID-19 was intentionally engineered to spare Jewish folks. He asserted with out proof that there are bioweapons being developed to focus on sure ethnicities, and known as for the Post’s article to be retracted.
Researchers and docs pushed again on the assertion, together with Michael Mina, a medical physician and immunologist.
“Beyond the absurdity, biological know-how simply isn’t there to make a virus that targets only certain ethnicities,” Mina wrote on Twitter.
Democrats and anti-hate teams rapidly condemned Kennedy’s feedback within the video.
“These are deeply troubling comments and I want to make clear that they do not represent the views of the Democratic Party,” learn a Saturday tweet from Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee.
“Last week, RFK Jr. made reprehensible anti-semitic and anti-Asian comments aimed at perpetuating harmful and debunked racist tropes,” US Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, mentioned in an announcement on Sunday. “Such dangerous racism and hate have no place in America, demonstrate him to be unfit for public office, and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.”
The Anti-Defamation League additionally responded to the feedback with an announcement saying Kennedy’s declare is “deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”
And one other anti-hate watchdog, Stop Antisemitism, tweeted, “We have no words for this man’s lunacy.”
On Monday, Kerry Kennedy issued an announcement saying, “I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” including that the remarks don’t signify “what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stands for.” She is president of the human rights group.
Kennedy is about to handle the GOP-led House subcommittee throughout a listening to Thursday to look at “the federal government’s role in censoring Americans.”
He has lengthy railed towards social media corporations and the federal government, accusing them of colluding to censor his speech throughout the COVID-19 pandemic when he was suspended from a number of platforms for spreading vaccine misinformation.
Herrig’s letter to Jordan known as Kennedy “a total whack job whose views and conspiracy theories would be completely ignored but for his last name.”
It requested the chairman to disinvite the candidate from Thursday’s listening to due to “video evidence of his horrific antisemitic and xenophobic views which are simply beyond the pale.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy threw chilly water Monday on the concept of disinviting the presidential candidate from testifying earlier than Congress.
“I disagree with everything he said,” McCarthy mentioned. “The hearing that we have this week is about censorship. I don’t think censoring somebody is actually the answer here. I think if you’re going to look at censorship in America, your first action to censor probably plays into some of the problems we have.”
Kennedy has a historical past of evaluating vaccines – extensively credited with saving tens of millions of lives – with the genocide of the Holocaust throughout Nazi Germany, feedback for which he has generally apologized.
His first apology for such a comparability got here in 2015, after he used the phrase “holocaust” to explain youngsters whom he believes had been harm by vaccines.
But he continued to make such remarks, ramping up throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. An AP investigation detailed how Kennedy has often invoked the specter of Nazis and the Holocaust in his work to sow doubts about vaccines and agitate towards public well being efforts to carry the COVID-19 pandemic below management, reminiscent of requiring masks or vaccine mandates.
In December 2021, he put out a video that confirmed infectious illness professional Anthony Fauci with a mustache harking back to Nazi chief Adolf Hitler. In an October 2021 speech to the Ron Paul Institute, he obliquely in contrast public well being measures put in place by governments world wide to Nazi propaganda meant to scare folks into abandoning essential pondering.
In January 2022, at a Washington rally organized by his anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that folks’s rights had been being violated by public well being measures that had been taken to scale back the variety of folks sickened and killed by COVID-19.
“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he mentioned.
The remark was condemned by the top of the Anti-Defamation League as “deeply inaccurate, deeply offensive and deeply troubling.” Yad Vashem of the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem mentioned it “denigrates the memory of its victims and survivors,” in addition to others.
After initially sticking by his remarks, Kennedy in the end apologized, tweeting, “I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors.”
Then, days after he launched his presidential marketing campaign this April, he wrote on Twitter that “the onslaught of relentless media indignation finally compelled me to apologize for a statement I never made in order to protect my family.”
___
Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri in Washington and Michelle R. Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.
___
The Associated Press receives help from a number of personal foundations to reinforce its explanatory protection of elections and democracy. See extra about AP’s democracy initiative right here. The AP is solely accountable for all content material.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”