Paris, 8 June 2023

The Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Dr Shimon Samuels, was disgusted to read the Tweet of a personality of high office, former Vice President of the Spanish Congress, Amparo Rubiales.

In a Tweet, she had written: “It is really the speech of a Nazi Jew!”, referring to opposition PP (Partido Popular) Coordinator, Elias Bendodo, on Government decisions regarding Spain’s next general elections.

Despite her experience, she perhaps does not realize her antisemitism.

In her youth as a Communist and an activist against Franco’s Fascism, she must have heard of antisemitic Nazism.

One wonders if she would have dared qualify, in the same manner, our mentor, Simon Wiesenthal, who together held close friendship with anti-Fascist Spanish inmates of the Nazi Mauthausen Camp, and who dedicated his life to bringing Nazi war criminals to Justice.

Does she know of the hundreds of real Nazis sheltered by the Caudillo regime along the Costa Blanca, such as Otto Skorzeny, Gerhard Bremer and Leon Degrelle? Does she know what they did to the Jews?

To equate Jews and Nazis is beyond defamatory and offensive, it is irresponsible and calls for more than an apology.

Madam Rubiales tweeted again five days later, still referring to her political opponent by farcical calling him a “Nazi”, but not a “Jew”! In fact, he is a Sephardi Jew... not a Nazi!

Madam Rubiales needs an education against antisemitism, or at least to read the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) Definition of Antisemitism, that has been adopted by EU countries – including Spain.

“We call on Rubiales to repent to the Jewish people... But she may consider us all as ‘Nazi Jews’,” concluded Samuels.

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