Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on July 4, 2017

Donald Trump gets the crowd pumped up prior to the start of the WrestleMania 23 at Detroits Ford Field, April 1, 2007. (Leon Halip/WireImage/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON (JTA) The anonymous Reddit user who is claiming responsibility for the altered videodepictingPresident Donald Trumpbody slamming someone with CNN superimposed over his head has a history of racism, anti-Semitism and incitement to violence, according to theAnti-Defamation League.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said in a one-sentence email to a JTA request for a response to the ADL report on the gif, The video did not come from Reddit. He did not say where the video came from.

Trump tweeted the gif, or graphics interchange format a short video that is friendly to multiple platforms on Sunday. It was drawn from a staged encounter years ago between wrestling impresario Vince McMahon and Trump, who are friends.

The presidenthas feuded with the media generally and CNN specifically in recent days. He has seized on CNNs retracting of a report linking a Trump ally to a Senate investigation, calling the news networka purveyor of garbage journalism. He taggedthe gif#FraudNewsCNN, and the official White House account, @POTUS, retweeted it.

Jared Yates Sexton, a political commentator who has criticized Trump, was the first on Sunday to trace the gifto a user of the Reddit social media platform and identified racist and anti-Semitic postings by the same user.

ADL in its analysis was more careful, stopping short of confirming that the Reddit user, who goes by the handle HanAssholeSolo, was behind the clip, saying instead that he appears to have created the version of the edited clip tweeted by the president and posted it on a sub-Reddit commonly used by President Trump supporters.

It noted that the Reddit user on Monday celebrated Trumps use of the gifas a personal victory and that other Reddit users congratulated him or her.

ADLs analysis tracked other memes or internet themes launched by the user, including a chart of CNN personalities with the purported Jews among them marked with stars of David and other intimations of Jewish media control.

In another post, the Reddit user, using the pejorative for African-Americans, said: I just like dancing when n****** are getting beat down by the cops. He or she also said that the liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soross dead bloated corpse being dragged through the streets would be my satisfaction.

Read more:
Trump's CNN wrestling video traced to online anti-Semite, ADL says - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Category: Anti-Defamation League
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