‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ read aloud in Greek parliament

JTA — A lawmaker for Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party has read out in parliament a passage from the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Ilias Kasidiaris, a spokesperson for Golden Dawn, read out Protocol 19 from the book: “In order to destroy the prestige of heroism we shall send them for trial in the category of theft, murder and every kind of abominable and filthy crime,” according to Panayote Dimitras of the Greek Helsinki Monitor.

Kasidiaris was addressing parliament this week at a discussion on lifting his immunity in connection with suspicions of assault. “There was absolutely no reaction” to this in parliament during the Tuesday session, Dimitras said, which, makes “all parties held as accomplices.”

In a written statement Friday, the Foreign Affairs Network of B’nai B’rith Europe called the manuscript’s reading in an E.U. parliament “a sign of moral corruption and degradation which must not be overlooked.” The silence with which the reading was received was “doubly worrisome,” the network wrote in its statement.

In June, Kasidiaris slapped female politician Liana Kanelli three times on the head during a television discussion. He was subsequently locked in a room in the studio but he knocked down the door and escaped.