A co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement (FGM), who redistributed an antisemitic video, issued a public apology on the pro-Palestinian charity’s website yesterday.
Greta Berlin shared the video, which accuses Jews of orchestrating the Holocaust, on her private Facebook page as well as FGM’s Twitter feed.
Ms Berlin said: “The fault is completely mine. Free Gaza had nothing to do with the post at all.”
Ms Berlin claimed that she had been unaware of the contents of the video entitled, "Zionists Ran the Holocaust and the Concentration Camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews", adding that she did not watch the “lecture” before sharing it with her Facebook friends.
In the video, the speaker, who was not identified, said that ‘Nazi’ is short-hand for “National Socialist Zionism”, with ‘Na’ standing for National Socialism and ‘zi’ for Zionism. He also claimed that Zionists orchestrated the Holocaust to force Orthodox German Jews to move to Palestine.
“The mission of the Nazis was to force the anti-Zionist Jews to accept Zionism. This is what the concentration camps were about. They put the anti-Zionist Jews under the direct administration of the Zionist Jews — to punish and get rid of the anti-Zionist Jews. That’s the part of the Holocaust that you were never told.
“Our popular mythology is that the terrible Nazis were attacking the Jews, but what we were never told is that there was great schism in the Jewish community of the world between the Zionists and the non-Zionists.”
The speaker also regurgitated the antisemitic stereotype about Jews being rich: “The Rothschilds had made so much money, they said: ‘We’ll buy our own state’. The Rothschilds sent people out to the Middle East to have Jewish settlements, which is today the state of Israel.”
He added: “People will never be told the facts because the press is totally in the hands of the bankers.”
Ms Berlin is undeterred by the scandal and said: “The Free Gaza movement will continue to challenge Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza. In the future, we will work to ensure that material posted from our account relates only to FGM’s activities, including Gaza’a Ark.”
The FGM is an international pro-Palestinian organisation, which was one of the groups behind the flotilla to Gaza in May 2010, and is endorsed by figures including South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, writer Noam Chomsky and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire.