A far-right Likud party member has become a thorn in the side of the ultra-hawkish party's leader Benjamin Netanyahu, a frontrunner in the race to become Israel's prime minister, as media reprint comments he made praising the Nazi system and denigrating Arabs. Moshe Feiglin, 46, has a strong chance of winning a parliamentary seat after gaining significant support within Likud, at a time when Netanyahu is seeking to soften the image of the right-wing opposition party. But Likud's governing body pushed Feiglin down to the 36th place on the election slate from the 20th slot following an appeal by a Netanyahu ally citing irregularities in the party primary. The support that Feiglin and other radical Likud members won at a party election to name parliamentary candidates for the legislative elections was a sharp blow for Netanyahu, a former prime minister. To make matters worse for the party leader, the Israeli media has since highlighted comments Feiglin made in a 1995 interview with the Haaretz daily, in which he praised the qualities of Hitler and spoke disparagingly of Arabs. An observant yarmulke-wearing Jew, Feiglin called the man responsible for the Holocaust an unparalleled military genius. "Hitler savored good music. He would paint. This was no bunch of thugs. They merely used thugs and homosexuals," Feiglin was quoted as saying of the Nazi regime at the time. "Nazism promoted Germany from a low to a fantastic physical and ideological status. The ragged, trashy youth body turned into a neat and orderly part of society and Germany received an exemplary regime, a proper justice system and public order," he said. The mass-selling Yediot Ahronot daily said Feiglin "was not ashamed of considering Hitler a genius." Feiglin, who lives in a Jewish colony in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has made similarly controversial comments on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He insists there is no such thing as a Palestinian people and that they and Palestinian-Israeli Arabs should be cleansed from their lands, media said, citing a text he had posted on the website of his "Jewish leadership" movement that was removed recently. "They will have to seek the right to self-determination in Arab states. Israel will encourage the Arabs to emigrate to their countries and assist any Arab who wishes to do so," Feiglin was quoted as saying. In a 2004 interview with Yediot he spoke of "a voluntary transfer to the 22 neighboring Arab states" of the some 1.4 million Palestinian-Israelis, who make up 20% of Israel's population. "Arabs don't live in the desert, they create it," he was quoted as saying.
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