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exclusive
Candace Owens attacked Jewish artist Zoe Buckman in private messages for defending Holocaust victims
Candace Owens — who bizarrely claimed last week that some accounts of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s experiments on Holocaust victims are “propaganda” because they would have been a “waste of supplies” — attacked Jewish artist and activist Zoe Buckman in private messages after Buckman criticized the remarks, Page Six is told.
After Instagram account Jewish on Campus wrote a summary of the podcast claiming that Owens “called Holocaust education ‘indoctrination,’ called Hitler’s actions during the Holocaust merely ‘nationalism,’ and called the proven atrocities the Nazis carried out ‘bizarre propaganda,'” Buckman publicly responded on the social media platform, calling Owens’ claims “evil” and saying that “there is never a need to minimize the experience of the Holocaust on any of the groups who perished or survived it.”
Now we hear that Owens sent Buckman — the ex-wife of “Friends” star David Schwimmer — a DM railing, “You guys literally believe everything you read as long as you can play the victim. It really is incredible.”
“For once, it really wasn’t about you,” Owens said, “Believe it or not, other groups have suffered genocide and this was their story.”
The former Daily Wire staffer made the remarks last week in a podcast ostensibly as part of a discussion on the 2015 BBC documentary “1945: The Savage Peace” which addresses the mass murder of German Christians immediately after World War II.
Owens then told Buckman to “shut up,” and listen to the whole episode before commenting on it.
Buckman — whose work has been shown in the Whitney and the National Portrait Gallery in London, among other museums — tells us, “It’s a pattern we see constantly: the antisemite denies or diminishes an atrocity committed against the Jews, forcing the Jewish people to respond factually with truth. The antisemite then accuses the Jews of ‘playing the victim.’ This adds another layer of bigotry and gaslighting.”
“We do not make victims of ourselves,” Buckman continued in a statement. “Across the globe and throughout the ages, Jews have been persecuted with mass attempts to eliminate our existence. And yet in every generation we respond by doubling down on hard work and on our core values of learning & giving & creating.”
Owens parted ways with the Daily Wire in March after reportedly feuding with co-founder Ben Shapiro over Israel and antisemitism earlier this year.
Owens work has been approvingly called a “full-fledged war against the Jews” by white supremacist Nick Fuentes. The Anti-Defamation League has called her “bigoted.”
Owens told us in a statement: “I did not ‘jump in a Jewish artists DMs.’ Rather, a Jewish artist jumped into my DMs, by tagging me in a full-throated lie so that she could play the victim. When people lie about something I say and then rush to attack me in my DMs, I reserve the right to tell them to shut up and stop playing the victim. As fashionable and irresistible as it has become to aggress others while playing the victim, it’s much more dignifying to simply shut up if you’re incapable of telling the truth.”
On Tuesday’s podcast Owens said, “The Nazis experimented on innocent people. Some of the stories, by the way, sound completely absurd. They just cut a human up and sewed them back together? Why would you do that? Literally, even if you’re the most evil person in the world, that’s tremendous waste of time and supplies. That just sounds like bizarre propaganda.”
The atrocities committed by Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, on inmates at Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz are well documented.
After the claims were met with outrage, a source close to Owens told the Post earlier this week that she “never denied that Mengele conducted experiments.”
“This is a misleading edited clip. In fact, if you listen to the full episode, you will hear that Candace condemned medical experiments,” said the source.
“The reason why this particular episode is so detrimental to Zionism is because they have polluted American minds to believe that we must defend Israel out of morality and the evils of the Holocaust,” she tweeted along with the clip. “Learning about how many people who committed holocausts and mass murders were protected by Israel is disruptive to that narrative.”
Staunch Israel advocate Rep. Ritchie Torres tweeted, “In the Candace Owens fictional account of WWII, the real victims were not the Jews but the Germans; the real villains, not the Axis but the Allies. She downplays the Holocaust while accusing the US and its allies of ‘ethnically cleansing Germans. Those harboring hate in their heart can be either ignorant or malevolent. Candace Owens is both ignorant and malevolent, both stupid and sinister.”
