Dublin – Former presidential hopeful Gemma O’Doherty has posted videos where she praises Hitler and claims the Holocaust is hoax.
The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland has made calls for Holocaust denial to be made a criminal offence as it is in Canada, Germany and Austria.
In an interview last September with Holocaust denier E Michael Scott, O’Doherty claimed that people are unwilling to discuss what she sees an issue.
“When you talk to them and say “once you start researching the Holocaust, it is absolutely shocking – it doesn’t add up at all’ – but there’s then just a deafening silence, the blinds come down and you are just looked at with scorn.”
E Michael Jones, who described himself as a professor in literature, said accounts of the Holocaust is a series of literary works, including books such as Anne Frank’s diary.
During the conversation, the pair discuss Hitler, and O’Doherty praises the genocidal German dictator.
“Europe was doing so well under Hitler and there was this incredible economic miracle and they were determined to be independent of the Jewish banking system,” said O’Doherty.
Her guest online blamed Israel for JFK’s assassination along with the CIA during the discussion.
On her website, O’Doherty has also posted a video entitled ‘The Truth about National Socialism’ which tries to portray Hitler’s Nazi party in a positive light claiming it was based on ‘positive Christian values’.
In another video in February with another Holocaust denier she suggested that the war in Ukraine was being exploited to allow Jewish people abandon Israel and move there.
“They are creating Israel part two there, which is going to be horrific.”
O’Doherty and her guest, Jim Rizoli Rabid Rib Eye Isr-a-Hell, then get into explaining how migration is being used to ‘dilute’ populations to stop people ‘turning’ on the Jews.
“It is hard to explain to people, once again, why the Zionists, the Jews, are behind all of this,” said O’Doherty.
One social media commentator remarked how the content on her website shows O’Doherty “has gone full Nazi.”
Chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, Maurice Cohen said reports show anti-semitism is on the rise in the US and Europe and that “Ireland is no different”.
There is confusion here about how anti-semitism should be reported, an area the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland is working on with the Gardaí, NGOs, European Commission and “through our own institutions.”
“Most people are not aware of what constitutes anti-semitism and that even a seemingly small act can grow to make this form of racism acceptable,” he added.
Mr Cohen said “we do not have the means in law in most cases to successfully prosecute such acts” and are “not sure” if proposed new hate speech laws will help.
“It must also be remembered that much of anti-semitism today is based around online rhetoric and in most cases from unknown sources.”
He warned against ignoring on-line extremists even if they appear to be in a very small minority.
“It is very dangerous, however tempting, to write off some perpetrators as just being crackpots. Jewish people throughout our history have always discovered that physical violence begins with words.
“It is for society in general and our legal experts in particular to determine where free speech ends and becomes incitement to hatred and incitement to violence.”
As it stands, the new legislation does not have a specific provision regarding Holocaust denial.
“We consider that the Holocaust warranted special attention and provision in the Bill.”
O’Doherty, a former journalist, failed in her attempt to get four nominations from local authorities which would have allowed her to put her name forward in the 2018 presidential election.
She then became increasingly far-right in her views on topics such an immigration and was subsequently banned from various social platforms.
During the Covid lockdown she and journalist John Waters failed in an attempt to have the courts declare the Government’s pandemic regulations illegal.
The Supreme Court has ruled in July 2022 that O’Doherty and Waters’ did not have to pay the State’s legal fees in their failed challenge to the pandemic laws.
In 2021, she was convicted at Bray District Court of threatening and abusive behaviour, refusing to give her name and address to a garda and resisting arrest.
O’Doherty was given a two-month suspended sentence and a fine of €750 for public order offences while protest banners were being put up on a footbridge in Kilmacanogue on August 28, 2020.
In December 2022, she was fined €750 at a District Court in Court for breaching Covid regulations in 2020 by attending a protest march in the city.
Garda evidence was that she insisted the virus was a “hoax” and that “RTÉ was spreading lies on behalf of the Government” about Covid.
