Supporters of the neo-Nazi PNOS Party in Switzerland. Photo: courtesy of Antifa Switzerland.

A Swiss far right politician has been convicted by a court in the city of Basel for pushing antisemitic propaganda in a Nov. 2018 address that was described by one political analyst as “the most outrageous antisemitic speech in decades.”

Tobias Steiger of the neo-Nazi Partei National Orientierter Schweizer (PNOS) was ordered to pay a fine of approximately $2,200 for claiming in the speech that Jews were responsible for starting both the First and Second World Wars. Under Swiss law, “spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories that accuse the Jews of having instigated and financed the Second World War” is a criminal offense.

Steiger was also sentenced to a suspended fine of nearly $13,000, which he will have to pay if he breaks the law again.

According to Hans Stutz — an expert on the far-right in Switzerland — Steiger delivered “the most antisemitic speech in decades” to be heard by a Swiss audience.

Steiger is also known as a Holocaust denier and enthusiastic promoter of antisemitic conspiracy theories about the provenance of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has argued that “Zionists” deliberately settled “Africans and Muslims” in Europe, and claimed that the coronavirus is a “Zionist virus” designed to weaken the Swiss economy.

First classified by the Swiss federal police as an “extremist” group by the Swiss federal police in 2001, the PNOS publishes a magazine called “Harus!” — the Swiss Nazi equivalent of the German “Sieg Heil.”