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		</div><p>White House press secretary Sean Spicer has apologised for making an &#8220;insensitive&#8221; reference to the Holocaust in comments about Syrian President Bashar Assad&#8217;s use of chemical weapons.<br />
Mr Spicer said during a White House briefing yesterday that Adolf Hitler &#8220;didn&#8217;t even sink to using chemical weapons&#8221;.</p>
<p>The remark drew strong criticism from Jewish groups and critics who noted it ignored Hitler&#8217;s use of gas chambers to exterminate Jews during the Holocaust.</p>
<p>Mr Spicer said during an interview with CNN he had been trying to make a point about President Assad&#8217;s use of chemical weapons and gas against his people. But he &#8220;mistakenly made an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which there is no comparison,&#8221; he said. &#8220;And for that I apologise. It was a mistake to do that.&#8221;</p>
<p>It was the second day in a row in which Mr Spicer, Donald Trump&#8217;s main spokesman, appeared to struggle to articulate the president&#8217;s foreign policy at a critical time. The White House generated criticism at the start of the year when a statement on international Holocaust Remembrance Day did not make any reference to Jews.</p>
<p>In the CNN interview, Mr Spicer said: &#8220;My comments today did not reflect the president&#8217;s, were a distraction from him and frankly were misstated, insensitive and wrong.&#8221; He added: &#8220;Obviously it was my blunder.&#8221;</p>
<p>Mr Spicer had earlier delivered a garbled defence of his remarks in which he tried to differentiate between Hitler&#8217;s actions and the gas attack on Syrian civilians last week. The attack in northern Syria left nearly 90 people dead, and Turkey&#8217;s health minister said tests show sarin gas was used.</p>
<p>&#8220;I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no, he (Hitler) was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,&#8221; Mr Spicer said. &#8220;There was clearly &#8230; I understand your point, thank you. There was not &#8230; He brought them into the Holocaust centre I understand that. &#8220;I appreciate the clarification. That was not the intent.&#8221;</p>
<p>The comparison to the Second World War appeared to be part of a message the administration was trying to deliver as it explains its tactics in Syria. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis noted in a separate briefing that &#8220;the intent was to stop the cycle of violence into an area that even in World War II chemical weapons were not used on battlefields&#8221;.</p>
<p>Democrats and Jewish organisations condemned Mr Spicer&#8217;s comments. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said he was &#8220;downplaying the horror of the Holocaust&#8221; and should be fired. The New York-based Anne Frank Centre for Mutual Respect called on Mr Trump to sack Mr Spicer, saying he had denied that Hitler gassed Jews during the Holocaust.</p>
<p>Mr Spicer&#8217;s comments came on the first day of Passover and a day after the White House held a Seder dinner marking the emancipation of the Jewish people, a tradition started during the Obama administration.</p>
<p>According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis experimented with poison gas in late 1939 with the killing of mental patients, which was termed &#8220;euthanasia&#8221;. Both mobile and stationary gas chambers were later used, with up to 6,000 Jews gassed each day at Auschwitz alone.</p>
<p>On Monday, the White House clarified remarks by Mr Spicer that the use of barrel bombs by the Assad regime might lead to further military action by the US.<br />
KEYWORDS: Sean Spicer, Donald Trump</p>
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