A Democratic watchdog group has called on a U.S. House of Representatives committee to extend an invitation to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to retract after the Democratic presidential candidate was falsely filmed suggesting that COVID-19 could be ethnically targeted to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.

Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, sent a letter to Ohio Republican Representative Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, requesting that Kennedy not be invited to a hearing which is scheduled for Thursday after the election of the candidate. comments at a New York City dinner last week sparked widespread accusations of anti-Semitism and racism.

In the filmed remarks first published by the New York Post, Kennedy said there is an argument that COVID-19 is ethnically targeted “and that it” disproportionately attacks certain races.

COVID-19 is targeted to attack white people and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he added. We don’t know if it was targeted or not, but there are documents showing the racial or ethnic difference of the impact before that.

After the video was made public, Kennedy posted on Twitter that his words were twisted and denied ever suggesting that COVID-19 was deliberately designed to spare Jewish people. He claimed without evidence that biological weapons are being developed to target certain ethnicities, and called for the Post article to be retracted.

Researchers and doctors have opposed the claim, including Michael Mina, a physician and immunologist.

Absurdity aside, there is simply no biological know-how to create a virus that only targets certain ethnicities, Mina wrote on Twitter.

Democrats and anti-hate groups were quick to condemn Kennedy’s comments in the video.

These are deeply disturbing comments and I want to make it clear that they do not represent the views of the Democratic Party, read a tweet on Saturday from Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Last week, RFK Jr. despicable anti-Semitic and anti-Asian remarks aimed at perpetuating harmful and debunked racist tropes.

US

Representative Suzan DelBene

from Washington

chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said in a statement Sunday. “Such dangerous racism and hate has no place in America, demonstrates his unfitness for public office, and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

The Anti-Defamation League also responded to the comments with a statement saying that Kennedy’s claim is highly offensive and fuels Sinophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we’ve seen evolve over the past three years.

And another anti-hate watchdog, Stop Antisemitism, tweeted, “We have no words for this man’s insanity.

On Monday, Kerry Kennedy released a statement saying, “I strongly condemn my brothers’ deplorable and untrue comments last week about Covid being designed for ethnic targets, adding that the comments do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights for State.” . She is president of the human rights organization.

Kennedy will address the GOP-led House subcommittee at a hearing on Thursday to examine the federal government’s role in censoring Americans.

He has long railed against social media companies and the government, accusing them of conspiring to censor his speech during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was suspended from multiple platforms for spreading vaccine misinformation.

Herrig’s letter to Jordan called Kennedy a total lunatic whose views and conspiracy theories would be completely ignored without his last name.

It asks the chairman to invite the candidate to Thursday’s hearing because of video evidence of his abhorrent anti-Semitic and xenophobic views, which are simply out of sight.

The subcommittee didn’t immediately answer a question about how it would respond, but House Speaker Kevin McCarthy did

(R-Bakersfield)

on Monday threw cold water at the idea of ​​not inviting the presidential candidate to test before Congress.

I disagree with everything he said,” McCarthy said. “The hearing we have this week is about censorship. I don’t think censoring someone is really the solution here. I think if you start looking at censorship in America, your first action to censor probably plays into some of the issues we have.

Kennedy has a history of comparing vaccines widely believed to have saved millions of lives to the genocide of the Holocaust during Nazi Germany, comments for which he has sometimes apologized.

His first apology for such a comparison came in 2015, after he used the word holocaust to describe children he said had been injured by vaccines.

But he continued to make such comments during the COVID-19 pandemic. An AP investigation detailed how Kennedy’s work often invoked the specter of the Nazis and the Holocaust to cast doubt on vaccines and oppose public health efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic such as mandating masks or vaccine mandates.

In December 2021, he released a video showing infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci sporting a mustache reminiscent of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. In a speech to the Ron Paul Institute in October 2021, he obliquely compared public health measures taken by governments around the world to Nazi propaganda designed to scare people into giving up critical thinking.

In January 2022, at a rally in Washington organized by his anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy complained that people’s rights were being violated by public health measures taken to reduce the number of people getting sick and dying from COVID-19.

Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did, he said.

The comment was condemned by the head of the Anti-Defamation League as highly inaccurate, highly offensive and highly disturbing.

After initially sticking to his comments, Kennedy eventually apologized by tweeting, I apologize for referring to Anne Frank, especially families who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust.

Then, days after he launched his presidential campaign in April, he wrote on Twitter that the media’s relentless outcry finally forced me to apologize for a statement I never made to protect my family.

___Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri in Washington and Michelle R. Smith in Providence, RIhode Island contributed to this report.