The Guardian reports:

The head of a prominent US Jewish civil rights body said Elon Musk’s repeated fascist-style salute during Donald Trump’s inauguration could act as a spur for violent extremists.

“The salute itself should be enough to warrant condemnation and attention,” said Amy Spitalnick, adding that so should “the ways extremists see an action like this and take it as license for their own violent extremism”.

Spitalnick is chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a progressive non-profit founded in the 1940s and headquartered in New York City. On Monday, she watched with the rest of the world as Musk, the world’s richest person and a key Trump ally, spoke in Washington at the new president’s inaugural rally – and gave two fascist-style salutes.

Musk and his followers have sought to brush off the affair, but to Spitalnick, “there was nothing ambiguous” about the salutes, no matter how many attempts are made to describe them as “Roman” or anything else.

“There’s a long history here,” she said. “The fact that Nazi salutes are now a regular part of our political discourse is how I got involved with all of this. Before JCPA, I led the non-profit [Integrity First for America] that brought a lawsuit over [the far-right march in 2017 in] Charlottesville and against [the activist] Richard Spencer and a variety of other defendants who are clear neo-Nazi extremists.

“You know: ‘Gave the Roman salute’ is just the euphemistic way of saying ‘Nazi salute’.”

To Spitalnick, “most people today don’t have a full understanding of what the term ‘fascist’ even means, and so naming it for what it is – the Nazi salute – feels important right now.”

It’s also important, she says, not to dismiss the fallout as just another online spat, an attempt to distract opponents with outrageous behavior. Not only has Musk expressed support for Alternative für Deutschland, a German far-right party widely accused of Nazi-esque views, but he chose to throw out his right arm on day one of an administration that has thrown out executive orders advancing draconian policies on immigration, equality and more.

Musk’s salute found a warm welcome on far-right sites – much as when in November 2023 he endorsed a post on his own platform, X, that said Jewish people promote “hatred against whites” and support immigration by “hordes of minorities”. After condemnation from advertisers and the Biden White House, Musk apologized: saying it “might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done”, he visited Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland, in a show of contrition.

To Spitalnick, that apology rang hollow: “There was some engagement with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu [of Israel] and others that was used as attempted cover for not just his own embrace of antisemitism and extremism but the ways in which he’s let it run rampant on X, and given the ways in which it’s normalized, not just on social media but in our politics more broadly, we can’t excuse that. We can’t give it cover in any way.” [Continue reading…]