At a Holocaust Denial Conference, in 2006, David Duke shakes hands with former Iranian President Ahmadinejad.

A Jerusalem-based watchdog group, NGO Monitor, on Monday sharply criticized the British medical journal, The Lancet, over support by two of the authors of An Open Letter for the People of Gaza, published in July, of an anti-Semitic video by white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Drs. Paola Manduca and Swee Ang Chai, both of the University of Genoa in Italy, promulgated emails suggesting recipients watch the online diatribe against Jews and Israel.

NGO Monitor noted that: on August 14, 2014, Manduca forwarded an email from Ang with the subject line “CNN Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix” to the Italian Google group Sempre Contro la Guerra. The email contains a link to a Duke video of the same title.

“‘This is shocking video please watch, This is not about Palestine – it is about all of us!'” Ang wrote, according to the report. “The email also contained, in bold red lettering, ‘SEE THIS VIDEO BEFORE IT IS REMOVED FROM CIRCULATION – Please do pass on to others who you think would be interested and would pass on>>>The whole world needs to know,'” according to the Israeli monitoring group.

Manduca forwarded a message alleging that the Boston marathon bombings were in fact carried out by Jews. “Let us hope that someone in the FBI is smart enough to look more carefully at the clues in Boston and find the real culprits behind these bombings instead of buying the Zionist spin”, it said.

“The Lancet‘s leadership, including Richard Horton and Reed Elsevier Properties, must immediately condemn these individuals and retract their tainted letter,” said Yitzhak Santis, Chief Programs Officer at NGO Monitor. “There is no excuse for The Lancet to give prominence to Manduca and Ang, individuals who trade in racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

In defense, Lancet editor, Dr Richard Horton, told the Daily Telegraph that the NGO Monitor revelation was “…utterly irrelevant. It’s a smear campaign,” adding that, “I don’t honestly see what all this has to do with the Gaza letter. I have no plans to retract the letter, and I would not retract the letter even if it was found to be substantiated.”

In reply, Santis called Horton’s response “fundamentally immoral,” and added that the Lancet’s editor’s “cavalier dismissal of blatant antisemitism … (is) deeply disturbing.”