US President Donald Trump hosted evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress, who once claimed that Jewish people were going to hell, at the White House’s Hanukkah celebration on Wednesday.
During the reception, Trump signed an executive order targeting anti-Semitism on college campuses, which was, however, criticised by some left-leaning Jewish groups which asserted that the law may add to limiting free speech.
Speaking at the Wednesday event, Jeffress praised Trump as “the most pro-faith president in history” who he claimed is “on the right side of God”. POTUS responded by lauding the pastor for talking “really great about me” and separately pledging to “always celebrate and honour the Jewish people”.
He added that the Jewish religion is “a cherished part of our family”, in an apparent nod to the fact that his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner are Jewish.
Netizens, meanwhile, remained at loggerheads over the Hanukkah reception, with some touting Trump as “the greatest friend of Israel among all US presidents” and Robert Jeffress as a “great pastor”.
Others were not that polite, issuing sarcastic tweets in which they specifically expressed surprise over an “anti-Semite pastor” being invited at the Hanukkah celebration.
Jeffress has made a spate of controversial comments about other faiths in the past, including in 2010, when he told the Trinity Broadcasting Network that Islam and Mormonism are “heresies from the pit of hell”, and that “you can’t be saved being a Jew”.
In a 2008 sermon, he preached that “hell is not only going to be populated by murderers and drug dealers and child abusers”.
“Not only do religions like Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, not only do they lead people away from the true God, they lead people to an eternity of separation from God in hell. […] Hell is going to be filled with good religious people who have rejected the truth of Christ,” he claimed.
Trump, for his part, sparked outrage among the Jewish community in the US in August, when he suggested without clarifying that American Jews who vote for Democrats are disloyal.