A centre-left Democratic Party (PD) councillor in the northern region of Trentino has come under fire for a historical tweet in which he compared Israel to Second World War German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler when the official was in his teens.
The councillor in the worn of Lavis, 25-year-old Youness Et Thairi, wrote eight years ago in 2014, when he was 17: “The (Israelis) should be the first to understand what it means to be massacred seeing that there was a certain Hitler who exterminated them, and yet they are doing the same thing (to Palestinians)”.
The chair of Alliance for Israel, Alessandro Bertoldi, said “it is the third day running that we have been forced to deal with a fresh report of raving statements, mystification of reality, hatred for Israel and its citizens on the part of an institutional political representative”.
Last week a PD candidate for the September 25 general election in Italy, Raffaele La Regina, was forced to resign as candidate after an anti-Israel post, in which he said Israel didn’t exist.
He was widely condemned but another PD candidate supported him saying that it was legitimate to criticise Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians.
Rightwing League party leader Matteo Salvini said it was “shameful” to see such anti-Israel sentiments voiced by the Italian left, as they had allegedly been by Britain’s Labour party under former leader Jeremy Corbyn a well as by far-left French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.