Benjamin Netanyahu Defends Elon Musk From Allegations He Made Nazi Gesture at Trump Rally: ‘Falsely Smeared’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the claim that Elon Musk performed a Sieg Heil salute at a rally for President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day, submitting on Thursday that Musk is a “great friend of Israel” who is being “falsely smeared.”
At a rally in Washington, D.C., following Trump’s swearing-in ceremony on Monday, Musk was introduced to thunderous applause before declaring that Trump’s triumph in the 20204 election was “no ordinary victory” but a “fork in the road of human civilization… this one really mattered.”
“And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you,” he continued before clutching his hand to his chest and extending it upwards.
Moments later, he made the same gesture again while continuing to praise the crowd for electing Trump.
“My heart goes out to you!” said Musk.
Online, many of Musk’s detractors insisted that he was performing a Sieg Heil, while others argued he was merely making a grateful, if slightly awkward, gesture.
On Thursday, Netanyahu waded into the controversy.
Responding to a tweet from Musk in which he said 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 offered an unqualified defense of the world’s richest man.
“@elonmusk is being falsely smeared,” began the prime minister. “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.”
“I thank him for this,” he concluded.
Musk visited Israel and met with Netanyahu in November 2023, a month and change after the October 7 attack, and shortly after he agreed with a user on his own social media platform who stated that “Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
