The Hebrew University of Jerusalem will not take any steps against a faculty member who compared children of Jewish settlers to Hitler Youth.
The university president, Professor Hanoch Geutfreund, met last week with Moshe Zimmerman, the professor who made the remarks.
Geutfreund, who said the university did not support Zimmerman’s views, told Israel Radio that no action would be taken against Zimmerman.
In an recent interview in the weekly newspaper Yerushalayim, Zimmerman said he saw strong similarities between the two groups. “There is a whole sector of Israeli society, that without hesitation I would call a copy of the Nazis,” he said.
“Look at the children of Hebron: They are exactly like Hitler Youth. They are brainwashed from age zero that Arabs are bad and about anti-Semitism, making them paranoid and racist — just like the Hitler Youth.”
Zimmerman later said that his remarks had been misquoted and, in one case, fabricated. But he did not withdraw his opinion that some similarities exist between Nazi hate propaganda and the ways settlers indoctrinate their children to hate Arabs.
Geutfreund said he thought that the headlines accompanying the article had distorted Zimmerman’s comments, adding that this was not the first time a faculty member’s comments had elicited a strong public reaction.
Zimmerman said the uproar surrounding his comments about the children of settlers overshadowed the primary content of the interview, which had to do with new findings he had made in his research on the Third Reich.
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