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Greece's Golden Dawn party hails Hitler as 'great personality'

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ANI Athens

Cohering its testimonials as a defiant Neo-Nazi force, Greece's accelerating militant Golden Dawn party has described Hitler as a "great personality" and indicted homosexuality as a "sickness".

In a scarce interview with the Austraian current affairs show 60 minutes, the Golden Dawn MP Ilias Panagiotaros said that the group was invloved in an "extremely ugly [war]" and that "in every period of time, there must be, there are, some people who are doing the dirty work". Adding further, when asked about Hitler, that he was "a great personality, like Stalin".

Panagiotaros, who is widely seen as the organisation's chief overseas strategist, faced charges of participating in a criminal gang, lashed out at the minorities the party considers deviant in the 60 Minutes interview, describing Muslim immigrants as jihadists and gays as "faggots".

 

According to the Guardian, Members of Greece's gay community and dark-skinned immigrants have been singled out for attack by Golden Dawn hit squads. The paramilitary units roamed the streets with seeming impunity until a government crackdown against the group spurred by the murder last September of the Greek musician and anti-fascist activist Pavlos Fyssas.

The party, until recently Greece's third biggest political subjection, has since seen a revive in the polls with support from Voula Patoulidou, one of Greece's greatest sporting legends. The party has sworn to hold a "Greek only" food handout on the Thursday before Easter, the most important religious festival in the Orthodox calendar.

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First Published: Apr 17 2014 | 2:47 PM IST

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