WASHINGTON (JTA) — A Jewish World War II prisoner of war appeared in an ad for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, saying her rival Donald Trump “insulted all of our military.”
The ad released Friday on social media shows Joel Sollender, 91, of San Diego, Calif., watching Trump, the Republican nominee, disparaging Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., last year during the lead-up to the primaries. McCain and Trump differed on immigration issues, and Trump had called McCain a “dummy.”
The ad includes a segment of a political event in Iowa in which Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, challenges Trump for using the pejorative and says that McCain is a war hero.
Trump replies, “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”
“Apart from the outrage of the insult to prisoners of war,” a choked-up Sollender says in the ad, “he insulted all of our military.”
“He’s everything I would not want to be or emulate, and I would hope we would not adulate a man like him and put him into the most precious office in our country,” he says.
The ad does not mention it, but Sollender, who was captured after taking out a German bunker with a grenade during the Battle of the Bulge, feared that his captors would discover he was Jewish.
“I was apprehensive that they would find out I was Jewish,” Sollender told the Union Tribune of San Diego, where he lives and has been active in local philanthropic causes, in a 2015 interview.
In recent weeks, Trump and Clinton have each cited dozens of endorsements from top military and national security personnel.
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