(JTA) — A Hamas leader and co-founder of the terror movement said in a television interview that President-elect Donald Trump may be Jewish.
Mahmoud Al-Zahhar made the remarks in an interview on the Al-Jazeera news network shortly after the election earlier this month, according to a video translated into English by the watchdog group MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute.
“Trump loves the Jews, and not only because he likes the Jewish religion. I do not rule out the possibility that he is a Jew. He loves the Jewish religion, and the most important thing in the Jewish religion is Jewish money” Al-Zahhar said during the interview.
He bolstered his statement with this argument: “In 1947, Harry Truman was a marginal candidate in the U.S. elections. He was approached by the Jewish money – which is the Jewish religion – and was awarded two million dollars, which made his electoral campaign prosper, because in American society you hand out money, you hand out pictures, posters, hats, and so on, and people who do not read at all are exposed to this. The outcome was that he won. Truman’s first decision – driven by those two million dollars – was to recognize the Israeli entity in 1948. So the Jewish ‘religion’ – the Jewish dollar – is the real decisive factor.”
Al-Zahhar also called the United States a “country of settlers.” He suggested that Trump ask his father where he came from. “The president before [Trump] was an African settler,” he said.
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