Huwaida Arraf and Mairead Maguire on the Free Gaza Movement's ship Spirit of Humanity on 28 June 2009. Photo: wiki commons.

Greta Berlin, the founder of the Free Gaza Movement, published a tweet at the beginning of the month that directly blamed Zionists for the Holocaust. “Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews”, Berlin tweeted through the official Twitter feed of the group. A link was posted with the tweet to an anti-Semitic video featuring Eustace Mullins, a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite who claims the Jews are at war with the Western World. In the video he says that the word “Nazi” is translated to mean “National Socialist” and “Zionist.”

The tweet was later retracted. Berlin stated: “I shared it without watching it. I am sorry that I just sent it forward without looking at it. It won’t happen again,” said the group’s founder in a statement.

One supporter, Larry Derfner, quoting Greta Berlin, believes the post was simply a discussion over the horrors of propaganda: “[the post] came from Greta’s private Facebook page and was shared with a group of people who were discussing propaganda and racism, and this link was an example of the terrible propaganda that could be spewed on websites” he quoted on his blog.

The tweet appears to have led to the resignation of at least one Free Gaza board member, Naomi Klein, a Canadian author and social justice activist. In her own tweet on the matter, she cites leadership challenges as the reason for her resignation.