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Swedish Minister with Ties to Turkish Extremists Resigns after Comparing Israel to Nazis

The Swedish Minister of Housing and Urban Development resigned on Monday after reporters discovered old footage of him comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.

Mehmet Kaplan, a member of the Green Party, a junior partner in Sweden’s governing coalition, said in 2009 that there were “similarities” between what Palestinians experience now and what Jews lived through under the Nazis in the 1930’s. Israel’s ambassador to Sweden called those remarks “deeply anti-Semitic.”

Kaplan defended himself on the website of the newspaper Expressen, saying that he “on several occasions criticized the actions of the state of Israel severely,” but that he was not anti-Semitic. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven accepted Kaplan’s resignation but praised him for possessing “humanistic and democratic values.”

The video from 2009 emerged after it was reported that Kaplan had attended a dinner with Turkish ultra-nationalists in 2015. Among those attending the dinner was Ilhan Senturk, the Swedish head of the ultra-nationalist “Grey Wolves” organization, which was implicated in political violence in Turkey in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Another controversial figure present at the dinner was Barbaros Leyani, the former vice-president of the Turkish National Association of Sweden. Leyani was force to resign from his post after he called for killing “Armenian dogs” at a rally last year in Stockholm.

Kaplan, a native of Turkey who came to Sweden as a child, has also been tied to Milli Gorus, an organization that, according to Agence France-Presse, “is suspected of promoting religious fundamentalism.”

Kaplan admitted to his ties to these organizations but “that doesn’t mean I agree with them on everything,” he claimed on Swedish TV.

Opposition leader Anna Kinberg Batra of the conservative Moderate Party criticized the government for “being passive and slow” in reacting to the controversies surrounding Kaplan.

[Photo: Alliansen Återtåget / YouTube ]