Trump dismisses question on anti-Semitism

US President Donald Trump and a Jewish reporter exchanged harsh words during Trump’s nearly 80-minute press conference on Thursday.

Jake Turx, who writes for the Jewish publication Ami Magazine, asked Trump to comment on the rise of anti-Semitic attacks taking place across the country.

“What we are concerned about and what we haven’t really heard you address is the uptick in anti-Semitism and how you intend to take care of it,” Turx asked.

Trump, expressing indignation, replied: “See he said he was going to ask a very simple question and it’s not. It’s not a simple or fair question. Sit down, I understand the rest of your question.”

“So here’s the story folks, number one, I’m the least anti-Semitic person you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” Trump continued. “Number two, racism, the least racist person. In fact we did very well relative to other people running as a Republican.”

Believing that the question was a personal affront, Trump talked at length about how he’s been friends with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for years.

“See he lied that he’d get up and ask a very simple question, so you know, welcome to the world of the media,” Trump added. “Let me tell you something, that I hate the charge, I find it repulsive, because people that know me - and you heard Betanyahu [sic] yesterday. Did you hear him? Bibi. ‘I’ve known Donald Trump for a long time,’ and he said, 'Forget it.' So you should take that before you get up and ask a very insulting question like that.”

After a second reporter brought up the question, Trump said the anti-Semitic attacks have come from his political opponents.

“This has to do with racism and horrible things being put up. Some of it, written by our opponents,” Trump said.

“Do you know that? Do you understand that? You don’t think anybody would do a thing like that. Some of the signs you’ll see are not put up by the people that love or like Donald Trump, they’re put up by the other side and you think it’s like playing it straight? No. But you have some of the signs and some of that anger caused by the other side. They’ll do signs and drawing that are inappropriate. It won’t be my people. It will be people on the other side to anger people like you.”

A recent report by the Anti-Defamation League concluded that much of the anti-Semitic vitriol has come from Donald Trump supporters. According to the report, there were 2.6m anti-Semitic tweets during the US presidential election, with 70 percent of them coming from 1,600 pro-Trump accounts.

“These aggressors are disproportionately likely to self-identify as Donald Trump supporters, conservatives or part of the alt-right, a loosely connected group of extremists, some of whom are white supremacists,” said the ADL report.

“The words that appear most frequently in the 1,600 Twitter attackers’ bios are ‘Trump,’ ‘nationalist,’ ‘conservative’ and ‘white.’”