Former Tory Peer Compares Jewish climate change protestor to Hitler Youth member

Chloe Markowicz - Thursday 17th December 2009


Jon Benjamin: chief executive of the Board of Deputies

A former Conservative peer has refused to apologise for comparing a Jewish climate change activist to a member of the Hitler Youth.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a climate change sceptic, launched a tirade against American activists including a Jewish campaigner in Copenhagen, where the UN Climate Change Conference is currently being held. Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, was speaking at an event held by a group opposed to climate change legislation called Americans For Prosperity. He became infuriated when young American protestors stormed the meeting, calling them "crazed Hitler Youth".

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Afterwards, Monckton spoke to Ben Wessel, a Jewish member of the sustainable development youth organisation SustainUS who was involved in the protest.
In a heated exchange captured on YouTube Monckton refused to shake hands with Wessel and said: "No, I'm not going to shake the hand of Hitler Youth." He did not desist even after Wessel replied he was Jewish and his grandparents had escaped Nazi Germany.

Monckton said: "And until you start caring, I will call you Hitler Youth."
The 57-year-old also accused Wessel and his colleagues of being like the Nazi party's youth movement and of acting in a "Hitler-ish fashion". He said: "Your faces around the world are known as members of the Hitler Youth, or people who do as much damage to the poor as the Hitler Youth did."

Monckton declined to speak to the Jewish News but responded to a British student on his blog who emailed him to complain about his "insults and partronising comments". Monckton made no attempt to apologise but instead continued to use inflammatory rhetoric and said he was considering reporting "the Hitlerettes of SustainUS" to the police.

He said: "In today's environmental movement, the intolerance, arrogance, and viciousness of Nazism is back." He added the audience at the Americans For Prosperity event had said that there had been "no attempt like this to prevent free speech had ever been seen in Copenhagen since the Nazis had occupied the city during the Second World War".

Wessel, a 20-year-old Jewish student at Middlebury College in Vermont, said that he had been offended and upset by Mockton's attack.
He told the Jewish News: "Mostly I was disappointed that he felt the need to go to such a hateful and hurtful level. I wish someone with his viewpoints was able to engage in a civil conversation."

He added that using such strong language was not only uncalled for, but "dangerous, unproductive and absurd."

Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies, called on Monckton to apologise. "Viscount Monckton's rant demonstrated extraordinary insensitivity and complete indifference to the fact that he was talking to the grandson of Holocaust refugees," he said. "If Viscount Monckton wants to contribute to the debate around climate change, his repeated labelling of a Jewish campaigner as a Hitler Youth does just the opposite and suggests a paucity of argument."
Stuart Polak, director of Conservative Friends of Israel, called the tirade "deeply troubling". He told the Jewish News: "I'm absolutely delighted and relieved that he is a former member of the Conservative party."

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