A protester holding a swastika flag and shouting anti semitic slurs was removed from a Bernie Sanders campaign rally in Phoenix on Thursday.
In a press conference on Friday, his fourth in as many days, Sanders said he was “shocked” to learn about what had occured from his staff.
“It is horrific, beyond disgusting, to see that in the United States of America, there are people who would show the emblem of Hitler and nazism,” Sanders told the media.
Supervising producer for Sanders’ campaign, Sara Pearl, tweeted Friday morning that “we had just released this video of what it means for Jews like me to elect our first Jewish President who will stand up to white nationalism and hate.”
Representative Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslim women to serve in congress, condemned the protester on Twitter, writing “this is an appaling display of anti semitism against a man whose family perished in the Holocaust.”
In a speech delivered last year, Sanders said his father came to the United States from Poland as a teenager to escape widespread anti semitism. The Vermont Senator has described growing up with an awareness that his father’s family “was wiped out by Hitler” during the Holocaust.
