Swedish Minister Who Compared Israel to Nazi Germany, Resigns

Sweden’s minister for housing and IT has announced he is stepping down following a week of controversies including the emergence of footage where he compared the treatment of Palestinians by Israel to that of the Jews by the Nazis. Mehmet Güner Kaplan recently come under fire for his alleged ties to Islamic organisations and Turkish ultranationalists. The pressure increased over the weekend when Swedish media published seven-year-old footage of him comparing Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians to the Nazis persecution of the Jews. Known as a passionate advocate of an independent Palestinian state, Kaplan was one of several members of the European Parliament who joined the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010, where a set of six ships attempted to bring 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid through Israel’s blockade into Gaza. RT reports: Mehmet Kaplan, a high-profile Swedish politician of Turkish origin and member of the Green party, was serving as a minister of Housing and Urban Development from 2014 until his resignation on Monday amid mounting controversy over his rumored close ties to the radical Turkish Islamist groups and his video interview from 2009 in which he says that “Israelis treat Palestinians in a way that is very like that [...]