Holocaust Denier Will Be GOP Nominee In Illinois Congressional Race
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Aiden Pink February 4, 2018
An anti-Semitic white supremacist and Holocaust denier will almost definitely be the Republican nominee for a congressional race in a district encompassing parts of Chicago and its suburbs.
Arthur Jones, a 70-year-old retired insurance agent and perennial losing candidate in races in Illinois and Wisconsin dating back to the 1970s, was the only person to qualify for the Republican primary in the heavily-Democratic 3rd District.
“Well, first of all, I’m running for Congress, not the chancellor of Germany. All right. To me the Holocaust is what I said it is: It’s an international extortion racket,” Jones told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Jones, a former leader of the American Nazi Party, has a campaign website containing a section called “Holocaust?” in which he calls the genocide of six million Jews “the biggest blackest lie in history.”
The Illinois Republican Party condemned Jones. “We strongly oppose his racist views and his candidacy for any public office, including the 3rd Congressional District,” party chairman Tim Schneider told the Sun-Times.
In 2016, the state party successfully challenged the signatures Jones gathered to get on the ballot. But this time, both the party and Jones’s two possible Democratic opponents have said that his signatures appear valid.
No other Republicans will appear on the ballot in the primary, which will take place March 20.
The Anti-Defamation League has long tracked Jones, who protested the 2009 opening of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and has spoken at many neo-Nazi rallies. “He is, by every definition, an anti-Semite and unrepentant bigot,” the ADL’s Chicago-Upper Midwest regional director, Lonnie Nasatir, told the Sun-Times.
Jones gave a speech last year at a gathering of the National Socialist Movement, which the Southern Poverty Law Center called one of the “most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the United States.”
In his speech, Jones said he was sorry he voted for President Trump, who “surrounded himself with hoards of Jews” like presidential advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected]
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