The Israel-based NGO B’Tselem acknowledged yesterday on its Facebook page that one of its researchers is a Holocaust denier.

After initially accepting the word of the researcher, Atef Abu Roub, that the Holocaust denying statements recorded in a video were not made by him, but a third person off screen, B’Tselem reversed their original position (original in Hebrew):

A few days ago a longer video of the conversation was published. Indeed, most of the conversation that was documented in the video is the translation of words of a third person. But watching the video it appears that, contrary to the above, these things were not a translation of the words of a third person, but were statements made directly by Mr. Abu Roub. In light of this, we wish to clarify our response in the matter which was given in good faith, and to clarify that an employee of B’tselem said the words on his own initiative, which we reject with disgust.

The statements made by Abu Roub were recorded as part of a movie made by Israeli filmmaker Tuvia Tenenbaum. Tenenbaum had posed as a German leftist to find out how Palestinians talked about Israel when they thought they were talking to a sympathetic listener. The comments by Abu Roub were made at 5:50 in the video embedded below.

Blogger “Elder of Ziyon” observes:

Keep in mind that these are the kinds of researchers B’Tselem relies on to tell them the truth about what is going on in Gaza. B’Tselem is one of the organizations that the UN relied on for statistics of how many “civilians” were killed in the war over the summer.
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If B’Tselem doesn’t fire Abu Roub, and soon, it tells us more about B’Tselem than about Abu Roub.

[Photo: reshettv / YouTube ]