Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of an extremist coalition party whose outspoken criticisms of Arabs have prompted accusations of racism, praised the ambassador and compared her to Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who acted on his own initiative to save Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. Dismissing Sweden’s argument about press freedom as a “fig leaf” for inaction, Lieberman told Israel’s Army Radio: “What angers us is that the Swedish government didn’t condemn it but hastened to reprimand the ambassador who did find it right to condemn this blood libel, which recalls the Dreyfus Affair.” Lieberman also compared the article to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an anti-Semitic tract purporting to show a global Jewish conspiracy which was widely cited by Hitler among others. >>>
