Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defended Elon Musk amid criticisms that the Tesla billionaire made a Nazi salute during a MAGA victory rally.
Netanyahu says Musk has been ‘falsely smeared’ over his straight-arm gesture earlier this week and thanked him for being a ‘great friend of Israel‘.
The PM further praised Musk for visiting Israel after Hamas‘ October 7 attack and allegedly supporting the country’s ‘right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes’.
Musk has come under fire over a gesture he made during a rally in Washington on Inauguration Day, in which he thanked Donald Trump’s supporters for helping secure the President return to the White House.
He then slapped his hand on his chest and extended his arm straight outward and upward with his palm facing downwards.
Netanyahu’s response comes after left-wing activists beamed a massive image of Musk’s infamous raised-arm salute and the word ‘Heil’ on to Tesla’s Berlin factory Wednesday night.
Musk has not explicitly denied claims the gesture looked like a Nazi salute, but hit out at his critics, writing on his social media platform X that the ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired’.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defended Elon Musk amid criticisms that the Tesla billionaire made a Nazi salute during a MAGA victory rally
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Netanyahu says Musk has been ‘falsely smeared’ over his straight-arm gesture earlier this week and further thanked him for being a ‘great friend of Israel’. The pair are pictured together in November 2023
Musk took to X late Wednesday night to slam his critics, alleging that the ‘radical leftists are really upset that they had to take time out of their busy day praising Hamas to call me a Nazi’.
Netanyahu replied to the tweet Thursday morning, thanking the SpaceX CEO for his support for the nation.
‘Elon is a great friend of Israel,’ the Prime Minister wrote. ‘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. I thank him for this.’
Musk then shared Netanyahu’s post adding: ‘thank you.’
The billionaire on Friday continued his social media crusade by retweeting footage of French President Emmanuel Macron raising his right arm with palm outstretched during a speech.
The post questioned whether Macron would ‘resign after giving a Nazi salute or is this just the way people engage large crowds when they are excited?’
‘It was astonishing how insanely hard legacy media tried to cancel me for saying ‘my heart goes out to you’ and moving my hand from my heart to the audience,’ Musk commented on the post.
‘In the end, this deception will just be another nail in the coffin of legacy media.’
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The PM further praised Musk for visiting Israel after Hamas ‘ October 7 attack and allegedly supporting the country’s ‘right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes’
The billionaire on Friday continued his social media crusade by retweeting footage of French President Emmanuel Macron raising his right arm with palm outstretched during a speech
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosts Elon Musk on the Gaza border in November 2023, showing him the horrors of the October 7th massacre at Kibbutz Kfar Aza
Musk’s gesture has sparked outrage amongst left-wing activists, including British political campaign group Led By Donkeys and Germany‘s Centre for Political Beauty.
The campaign groups beamed the words ‘Heil Tesla‘ on the side of the Gigafactory in Berlin Wednesday night – with an image of the electric car firm’s billionaire owner making the gesture during the MAGA rally.
A video showing Musk’s tweets in support of Germany’s far-right Alternative Fur Deutschland party were also displayed on the nine-meter-tall factory.
Led By Donkeys shared a picture of the projection on Instagram after pulling the stunt. ‘The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is promoting the far right in Europe. Don’t buy @teslamotors’, it said.
Center for Political Beauty shared a similar post, captioning it: ‘Last night: Gigafactory Tesla, Berlin. Buy a Tesla – and support the commercial arm of fascism! We as a society will now push this outstretched arm down’.
The Tesla factory in the German capital has become a site for protests.
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the plant last year in protest over the factory’s expansion plans, which involve cutting down half a million trees.
The factory was also shut down briefly following an arson attack in March.
The latest act of protest against Musk comes as the head of Germany’s largest concentration camp memorial called the tech billionaire a ‘mad extremist’.
Speaking to The Times about Musk, historian Jens-Christian Wagner, who runs the Buchenwald memorial, said: ‘One can only say to him, ‘Take a history book and withdraw for three days, read the history book and please be quiet with the poison he’s spreading’.’
‘I think Musk is a mixture of mad and right-wing extremist and that is particularly dangerous,’ he said of Trump’s ally.
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I giant image of Elon Musk doing a gesture people have likened to a Nazi salute alongside the word ‘heil’ was projected onto Tesla’s Berlin factory last night
Musk’s arm gesture was quickly scrutinized online, prompting critics to allege the gesture was an overt reference to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Claire Aubin, a historian who specializes in Nazism within the United States, said Musk’s gesture was a ‘sieg heil,’ or Nazi salute.
‘My professional opinion is that you’re all right, you should believe your eyes,’ Aubin posted on X, aligning with those who found the gesture was an overt reference to Nazis.
Musk took to his social media platform X to defend himself, stating that his opponents needed ‘better dirty tricks’ and that ‘the ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired‘.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization founded to combat anti-Semitism and has criticized Musk in the past, also rushed to his defense, saying it appears that ‘made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute’.
The Tesla CEO also infuriated Germany last month by claiming that the far-right AfD party is the only political group that can ‘save’ the country.
The party’s leader, Alice Weidel, responded: ‘Yes! You are perfectly right.’
Though the German government refused to comment on the matter, lawmakers from across the political spectrum were up in arms over Musk’s comments.
‘It is threatening, irritating and unacceptable for a key figure in the future US government to interfere in the German election campaign,’ Dennis Radtke, an MEP for the centre-right CDU, told the Handelsblatt daily.
Director of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation in Germany has condemned Musk, calling him a ‘mad extremist’
Musk has also encouraged the defunding of Wikipedia this week after a description of his recent flourish appeared on the website.
The fight pits two of the internet’s best-known tech giants against each other –and highlights the starkly different ethos behind Musk’s X social media site and Wikipedia, founded by American entrepreneur Jimmy Wales.
Musk, as the majority owner of X, is behind recent easing of content moderation rules, which has allowed for rampant disinformation across his social media platform, while simultaneously positioning himself as Trump’s right-hand man.
While Musk’s animosity towards Wikipedia may focus outwardly on the hand gesture, Wikipedia’s goal of factual neutrality makes it a natural adversary to X, a platform increasingly synonymous with heated culture wars, hate speech and disinformation.
Wikipedia and the media at large – which Musk has increasingly criticized – also pose a threat by holding him accountable as he thrusts himself into the center of US politics.
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The gestures were quickly scrutinized online, prompting critics to allege the gesture was an overt reference to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. But Musk took to his social media platform X to defend himself
In a December interview with New York magazine’s Intelligencer, Wales said the aim at Wikipedia is for editors to create content that is ‘clear and acknowledges the different viewpoints out there’ even amid ‘the rise in divisive feelings, partisanship, culture wars, all of that.’
At present, the site is regarded as generally reliable despite being written by a community of volunteers.
As of Wednesday, both Musk’s biographical Wikipedia page as well as the page on the ‘Nazi salute’ mention the episode at the inauguration victory rally.
