Israeli PM gives full-throated endorsement of Donald Trump’s billionaire adviser after he sparked outrage with stiff-armed gesture.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday backed tech entrepreneur Elon Musk after he was accused of giving a “Nazi salute” earlier this week.
“Elon Musk is being falsely smeared,” Netanyahu wrote on Musk’s social media platform X. “Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
“He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state,” added Netanyahu, who leads a right-wing Israeli government.
Musk quickly thanked the Israeli prime minister for his support.
The Tesla and SpaceX chief sparked a firestorm of controversy Monday by giving a stiff-armed, flat-palmed gesture to a crowd at a rally following U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The gesture resembled the Roman salute which was appropriated by European fascists including Nazi führer Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the first half of the 20th century.
Musk’s gesture went viral, and critics around the world lambasted the man who has recently become one of Trump’s most prominent advisers.
The billionaire sparked outrage in November 2023 when he publicly agreed with an antisemitic tweet claiming that Jewish communities have been “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
Musk has also faced widespread criticism that he has allowed hate speech against various minority groups to run wild on X since he purchased the social media platform in 2022.
