What Hitler has to say about Trump, Charlottesville

Corrections and Clarifications: An earlier version of this story contained images that have since been removed.

Central Jersey's most well-known Nazi is speaking up about the Charlottesville, Virginia, protests and President Donald Trump's response.

Isidore Hitler, whose name was legally changed in May to honor Adolf Hitler, said he knows some of the Nazis and white supremacists who attended the Charlottesville protests opposing the removal of a Robert E. Lee monument. 

The rallies, which occurred last weekend, turned deadly when a car rammed through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one person and injuring 19.

"What they're doing is they're erasing the white race. They're erasing, our culture, our history," Hitler said Wednesday of the push to remove Confederate monuments. "This is not fair to us. Why should we have history rewritten? It's history."

READ:Charlottesville vigils in Central Jersey say no to hate

READ:Hunterdon Nazi dad's name change to Hitler official

READ:Hunterdon Nazi dad gets legal approval for name change to Hitler

As for the violence that erupted during the protests, Hitler, who previously lived in Holland Township, said Nazis are often the targets of violence at rallies.

"Every time somebody like the Nazis and stuff like that go out and protest, it's like people have to come out and be violent towards the Nazis," he said. "And it's not fair to us."

The NAACP New Jersey State Conference administrative director, Safeer Quraishi, said the organization "absolutely condemns" Nazis and white supremacists.

"We absolutely condemn their behavior and everything that they stand for," he said. "We don't really think that there's a place in America for racism and bigotry of that sort."

Hitler said Nazis are generally peaceful people, until provoked.

"The world doesn't understand," he said. "Nazis are very peaceful people until someone steps on our toes and sits there and smashes us. We're not going to stand there and get hit with a baseball bat or get hit with a stick."

Quraishi, however, pointed out that the Holocaust occurred at the hands of the Nazis. 

"We've seen what the Nazis have done to the world: 6 million people were murdered for their religious beliefs, their sexual orientations, their being mentally disabled and physical disabled — I don't think that's a generally peaceful thing," he said.

In his first statement on the Charlottesville incident, Trump said "both sides" were to blame for violence at the neo-Nazi rally, before issuing a more forceful statement condemning white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan on Monday.

In his most recent statements on Tuesday, however, Trump seemed to double-down on his first statement by saying that left-wing groups were just as violent as the white supremacists in Charlottesville.

"He did do good because he did say about the left side that they did have sticks and all and they didn't have permits," he said. "He did do good on that."

Trump's changing statements on Charlottesville prompted many CEOs from major American corporations and unions to leave the American Manufacturing Council and Strategic and Policy Forum. 

Merck, which is based in Kenilworth, left the council Monday because of Trump's initial response to events in Charlottesville. His resignation was followed by the CEOs of Intel and Under Armour, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, the president of the AFL-CIO and the CEO of New Brunswick-based Johnson & Johnson.

Quraishi applauded the CEOs who withdrew from Trump's advisory business councils.

"We applaud them for standing up and saying that we, as business leaders of America, don't condone the president's refusal to take a stance on an issue like that," he said.

The CEOs' and union presidents' resignation is important because it shows that Trump's message is unacceptable to the American people, Quraishi said.

As for the "both sides" to blame, Quraishi said that while he can't speak for the entire New Jersey Conference of the NAACP, his own perspective is that Nazi protesters "have the right to say what they want to say, but the message they're sending is that there is an air of white supremacy in the United States. As a country, we can't condone that message.

"I think he (Trump) definitely should have said something much sooner than he did," Quraishi said. "And once he did make a statement, it was pretty outrageous."

When it comes to the removal of the Confederate statues, Quraishi said that the history is important to preserve, but what the statues represent is the issue.

"Obviously, these statues are a part of American history and are something that we shouldn't forget," Quraishi said. "They stand for the Confederacy of the United States which, at the time of the Civil War, was pro-slavery. 

Quraishi said he feels that the statues "are an important part of American history and we should never forget that the Civil War happened."

He said that a museum, however, would be more of an appropriate place for Confederate statues, not in town squares and communities.

In a museum, "people can go and learn about these things and realize this should never happen again," he said. "I think having these statues gives these Nazis, white supremacists, neo-Nazis a place to convene."

The NAACP in New Jersey does not have any rallies scheduled, but Quraishi said he is "trying to get put something in the works."

Hitler said that the push for the removal of Confederate statues is not going to sit well with Nazis, neo-Nazis and white supremacists and could cause "a big war."

"There's going to be a lot of rallies coming, let's put it that way," he said.

Staff Writer Nick Muscavage: 908-243-6615; ngmuscavage@gannettnj.com