Complaint Filed After Dutch Party’s Muslim Founders Say Hitler Was Jewish
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AMSTERDAM — A Dutch anti-discrimination group complained to police over a political party whose Muslim founders said Adolf Hitler was Jewish and that homosexuality was a contagious illness.
The Bureau Against Discrimination on Wednesday filed the hate speech complaint over the Free Democracy Party, which was established last week ahead of the general parliamentary election scheduled for March, the De Orkaan news site reported.
The party’s official Facebook page was blocked last month, in what was likely a response to anti-Semitic content published there, possibly by the party’s Dutch-Turkish founder Burhan Gökalp.
The administrators of the page wrote that “Jews are worse than the devil,” that they helped Adolf Hitler reach power in Nazi Germany and participated in the murder of other Jews, according to De Orkaan. “Hitler was an Austrian Jew who during World War II killed many Jews, including by gassing them,” the text read.
Jews also use the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders “as a pawn to stir trouble in Holland,” reads the text, which also falsely asserts that Wilders is Hitler’s grandson. Jews “run the United States but the stupid Europeans believe they were freed by the Americans” during the war, the text also reads.
On Twitter, the party’s official account asserted in a message that “homosexuality in the Netherlands is a contagious sickness that needs to be URGENTLY treated.”
But the blocking of the party’s Facebook page was over statements about Jews, the party wrote on Twitter, adding: “Apparently, freedom of expression is not for foreigners!”
Separately, over the weekend unidentified individuals engraved a swastika on the hood of a car of a Jewish businesswoman from the city of Hilversum east of Amsterdam, the broadcaster RTVNH reported Saturday. The woman, who was not named, said she thought the incident was a case of anti-Semitic vandalism directed at her because of her ethnicity.
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