‘I Instantly Thought of Rabin’ Says Governor After Trump Mentions 2nd Amendment
Image by Getty Images
WASHINGTON ) — Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, responding after Donald Trump said gun rights advocates could do something about Hillary Clinton, likened the political atmosphere in the United States to the period before an assassin killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“I instantly thought about Rabin and Israel,” Malloy, a Democrat like Clinton, the party’s presidential nominee, said Tuesday on MSNBC. “There were rallies going on in Israel where ‘Death to Rabin’ was shouted and politicians didn’t respond, so I’m going to respond.”
Malloy was speaking after Trump, the Republican nominee, addressed a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina,
“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment,” Trump said, referring to the constitutional right to bear arms. Clinton wants stricter gun controls, but is not opposed to the Second Amendment.
“By the way, and if she gets to pick her (Supreme Court) judges, nothing you can do folks — although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know,” he said.
Trump’s campaign lambasted the “dishonest media” for misrepresenting his remarks as calling for an armed attack on Clinton or on the judges she names.
“It’s called the power of unification,” Jason Miller, a communications adviser, said in a statement. “Second Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power. And this year, they will be voting in record numbers, and it won’t be for Hillary Clinton, it will be for Donald Trump.”
Miller did not explain how a call to gun rights supporters to vote in November would apply to Trump’s scenario, which posited options for gun rights supporters after Clinton’s election.
Clinton’s campaign called the remarks “dangerous.”
“This is simple—what Trump is saying is dangerous,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, said in a statement. “A person seeking to be the President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way.”
Malloy said Trump’s remarks echoed the “sickness” which permeated Israel prior to Rabin’s 1995 assassination.
Supporters of Rabin and some of his critics said that politicians, including then-opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, did not speak out during rallies when some in the crowd called Rabin a traitor or likened him to the Nazis because of the peace talks he led with the Palestinians.
“This is insanity, it’s a sickness, it’s an evil, Republicans and Democrats and Independents have to reject this, we have to stand up to this, otherwise this insanity will play itself out in our own country,” he said.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
