The Argentine office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center is considering suing a local priest who denied the Holocaust.
The Catholic priest, 68-year-old Manuel Quintas Barreiro, teaches ethics and philosophy in the small town of Pinto, in Santiago del Estero, a province in northwestern Argentina.
In a television interview in which he was introduced as “the Nazi padre,” Quintas called Hitler “one of the greatest statesmen in human history” and said Nazism was “good for Germany at that historical moment.”
Asked by his interviewer about the Holocaust, Quintas said he doubted that it existed.
“Don’t you think that claiming that 6 million died is a bit too much?” said the priest.
Quintas also said the July 1994 AMIA bombing that took 86 lives in Buenos Aires was “something terrible, but not as bad as the suffering inflicted on the Arab people by Israel.”
The Simon Wiesenthal representative in Argentina, Sergio Widder, said the center would complain to the Santiago del Estero bishop and to the archbishop of Argentina, Sergio Widder, said the center would complain to the Santiago del Estero bishop and to the archbishop of Argentina and ask that the priest “be disciplined.” Widder said the center is looking into suing Quintas under the 1993 anti-discrimination law, which forbids distribution of racist and anti- Semitic messages in any form.
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