The Facebook postings of an Austrian hairstylist calling for the killing of Jews was deemed a legitimate way to express “displeasure toward Israel,” an Austrian prosecutor recently ruled, according to a report Wednesday by Benjamin Weinthal in The Jerusalem Post.

Weinthal, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, reported:

A Turkish man showing Adolf Hitler, with a statement praising the death of Jews, are a legitimate expression of criticizing the Jewish state, the spokesman for the prosecutor office in the city of Linz, Philip Christl, said on Tuesday.

“I could have annihilated all the Jews in the world, but I left some of them alive so you will know why I was killing them…,” Ibrahim B. wrote on his Facebook page in December.

Ibrahim, the 29-year-old owner of a hair salon in the city of Wels near Linz, attributed the quote to Hitler and posted a picture of the German dictator on his Facebook site. Ibrahim launched his pro-Nazi tirade in the context of criticizing Israel’s Operation Protective Edge war against Hamas last summer.

The posting also called upon God to destroy Israel.

Police were notified of the postings but the prosecutor refused to pursue that case that Ibrahim violated the Austrian law against glorifying Nazis, but the prosecutor’s office characterized the “statements as merely expressing ‘displeasure toward Israel,’” according to an Austrian newspaper cited by the Post.

The Post also quoted Stefan Schaden, a member of the advisory board of the Austria-Israel Society, who said that this was not an isolated incident. Schaden said, “This position [of the prosecutor] is, unfortunately, becoming more popular. Everything passes as so-called criticism of Israel. Anti-Semitism seems to have been officially abolished. In view of the climate in Europe, it is a dramatic development.”

Earlier this month a German court ruled that a firebomb attack on a synagogue was not anti-Semitic.

In Germany, the Post also reported, Jewish groups criticized the government for establishing a commission on anti-Semitism that has no Jews on it.

The anti-Semitic nature of last summer’s anti-Israel protests in Europe prompted the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Italy to issue a statement saying that “[a]nti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility against Jews, attacks on people of Jewish belief and synagogues have no place in our societies.” Even before the protests, a study of anti-Semitism in Europe led European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor to declare, “Normative Jewish life in Europe is unsustainable.”

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