US Vice President Mike Pence received a wave of criticism for a tweet he posted in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday. The tweet featured a short video of Pence and his wife, Karen laying a wreath at Yad Va’Shem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, during their recent visit to Israel.
A few days ago, Karen & I paid our respects at Yad Vashem to honor the 6 million Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust who 3 years after walking beneath the shadow of death, rose up from the ashes to resurrect themselves to reclaim a Jewish future. #HolocaustRemembranceDay #NeverAgain pic.twitter.com/67UuC1cYI2
— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) January 27, 2018
The controversy revolved around Pence’s inclusion of the words “martyrs” and “resurrect” in his tweet, which critics claimed was a disrespectful usage of Christian terminology to describe an exclusively Jewish experience.
“‘Resurrect themselves?’ Pence dishonors the memories of the 6 million by co-opting them for the political agenda of his evangelical base,” tweeted Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe in response to Pence.
Matthew Yglesias, a journalist, claimed that Pence’s tweet reached a “low point” that surpassed President Donald Trump’s omission of any reference to Jewish victims in a statement last year on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“I really thought last year’s thing where they left out the Jews was a Holocaust Remembrance Day low point but Pence has taken this to new places in an amazing way,” Yglesias tweeted.
Laurie Cardozo Moore, the founder of “Proclaiming Justice to the Nations,” an organization that seeks to educate Christians about their Biblical responsibility to defend Israel and the Jewish people, spoke out in defense of Pence in an interview with Breaking Israel News.
“I stand amazed at the depths the Trump Haters will stoop, this time getting their Tweets in a twist over Vice President Pence’s use of the word ‘resurrection’ to describe the people of Israel’s rebirth in their Biblical homeland,” she said when asked to respond.
“We are privileged to be living in the most biblically historic and prophetic time in history, and Vice President Pence was only referencing what the prophets foretold about this period of the ingathering of the exiles to their ancient homeland,” she continued.
“Vice President Pence was stating a fact that the Jewish people have been brought back to their land by Almighty God as the prophets of Israel prophesied in the Torah.”
This shouldn’t offend anyone that knows his or her Tanach (Hebrew Bible). If we can learn anything from this episode, it is that those who hate Trump and Pence need a lesson in the Bible before they make such uninformed comments.”
