Early on Tuesday, the candy company offered up a classy response to Donald Trump Jr.’s insulting photo that compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of poisoned Skittles. Would you take handful?
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“That’s our Syrian refugee problem”, it reads.
“This image says it all”, Trump Jr. wrote in another tweet. Trump Jr. further editorialized in his tweet, saying “Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first”.
The post by the Republican presidential candidate’s son immediately went viral. The odds of being killed by a refugee in a terror attack is about 1 in roughly 3.6 billion, a Cato Institute study from last week said. “We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy”, Vice President of Corporate Affairs Denise Young said in the statement. There are no known threats to national security in the USA – or in Canada, which has accepted more than 30,000 Syrians since last November – linked to the resettlement of Syrian refugees.
The Trump campaign responded to a question about the photo with a more general comment on the controversy over the tweet.
Skittles manufacturer Wrigley distanced itself from the comment. The small bowl in Kittos’s photograph would contain approximately 100 Skittles, three of which Trump Jr, 38, suggests could be killers.
Donald Trump, Jr.’s candy-coated comparison sparked swift condemnation from social media after he posted it to Twitter on Monday. Last week, he made what some took as a Holocaust-themed joke in an interview with a Philadelphia radio station, referring to “warming up the gas chamber”.
This is the second time in recent days that the younger Trump has raised eyebrows with his perspective on issues in the 2016 election. Not only is the parallel dehumanizing, there is no evidence to support that three Syrian refugees out of every “bowl” of Syrian refugees “would kill” people. He has since softened his stance and said he would ban immigration from countries where terrorism is widespread and would introduce an “ideology test” for vetting new immigrants.
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Around 4.8 million refugees have been forced to flee Syria, mostly to neighboring Muslim countries, due to Syria’s brutal and ongoing civil conflict.
