U.S. President Donald Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer wrongly declared on Tuesday that Adolf Hitler did not use chemical weapons during the Second World War or against “his own people” — then further insulted the Jewish community with a stammering attempt to clarify.

Spicer issued three additional clarifications in writing over the course of the next hour, digging himself deeper as he tried to dig out. On the whole, it was a uniquely inflammatory and inept performance, on a major Jewish holiday, from a man paid to speak for the president.

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The gaffe-prone Spicer made his initial remarks at an afternoon White House briefing on the first full day of Passover. By early evening, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi had called for his firing, and Israel’s intelligence minister had declared that he should apologize or resign.

The controversy began with a question about Syria. Talking about dictator Bashar Assad, who has used chemical weapons to kill his own citizens, Spicer said, “You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

This, of course, is incorrect. Though Hitler’s Nazis largely stuck to conventional weapons on the battlefield, they infamously used gas to slaughter Jews en masse at their extermination camps.

Asked later in the briefing to explain what he meant, Spicer stammered out the following.

“I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing. I mean there was clearly — I understand your point — thank you, I appreciate that — there was not, in the, he brought them into the Holocaust centre, I understand that. But I was saying in the way that Assad used them where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent into the middle of towns, it was brought, so the use of it. I appreciate the clarification; that was not the intent.”

There is no such thing as “the Holocaust centre”; the Nazis exterminated people at multiple death camps. And Hitler, as is obvious, did use chemicals to kill his own people. Spicer, remarkably, was attempting to argue that Hitler’s gassing of civilians was morally superior to Assad’s because it was conducted in organized prisons rather than via indiscriminate bombing.

After the briefing, he issued a written statement emphasizing this bizarre point.

“In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust, however, I was trying to draw a contrast of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on innocent people,” he wrote.

Within 10 minutes, Spicer issued yet another clarification, changing the words “innocent people” to “population centres.” But that hardly addressed the problem. Finally, he added a new sentence to the end of the statement: “Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”

Later in the day Spicer issued another apology when he was interviewed on CNN by Wolf Blitzer, the son of Holocaust survivors.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said in an appearance Wednesday that he "made a mistake" by making a comparison to the Holocaust in comments about Syrian President Bashar Assad's use of chemical weapons.

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“Frankly, I mistakenly used an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust for which, frankly, there is no comparison,” Spicer said. “And for that, I apologize. It was a mistake to do that.”

Spicer’s remarks prompted astonishment from Jewish Americans, including Democratic Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin and Democratic Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz.

“Someone get @PressSec a refresher history course on Hitler stat #Icantbelievehereallysaidthat,” Cardin wrote on Twitter.

“I find nothing funny about the Press Secretary bungling Holocaust history,” Schatz wrote. “Because I’m not sure they should get the benefit of the doubt.”

Trump and his team have been criticized on several occasions for acts and statements many American Jews have perceived as insulting or anti-Semitic. The administration drew widespread condemnation for omitting any mention of Jewish people from its statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day; a spokeswoman explained then that they “took into account all of those who suffered.”

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