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The prestigious Simon Wiesenthal Center, which specializes in the fight against anti-Semitism, has been strongly critical of Spanish television network La Sexta for its plan to give a prime time interview to Isabel Peralta, a young fascist from Madrid who is becoming an icon of the Spanish extreme right, with television support.

The centre states that it has followed the case of the young woman since she made anti-Semitic statements in a speech at a homage to Spain's Blue Division, the soldiers that Franco sent to fight alongside Hitler's troops against the USSR. 

"It may bring viewers to the network, but to give this hater a voice on a nation-wide television will encourage admirers and perhaps incite to violence against Jews and other targets," said the organization's spokesperson, Shimon Samuels.

The center recalls that the young woman received a “scholarship” from German neo-Nazis, who promised to train her “to learn techniques for propaganda and combat... to patrol border regions to find illegals.”  It adds that the targets of this violence against foreigners would be mostly Muslim refugees and migrants, "despite Peralta's support for Palestinian Hamas," the ruling group in Gaza.

Israeli embassy protests 

The Spanish network's decision to interview the young anti-Semite has ended up provoking a diplomatic conflict with Israel. The Israeli embassy has registered a formal protest with La Sexta against its airing of the programme this Friday, calling it a “dissemination of anti-Semitism and hate speech,” at a time when such attitudes are growing in Europe.

"It is unfortunate and shameful that La Sexta gives space to the spread of anti-Semitism and hate speech," the embassy noted.

Catalan writer Pilar Rahola was another who was astonished by the fact that the network - supposedly the most progressive of Spain's state-wide networks - was interviewing the young neo-Nazi. Rahola expressed her utter indignation after seeing the promotional message for the broadcast. “An unhinged person, defending an ideology of death that planned an extermination industry in its attempt to wipe out all European Jews and murdered millions of people, is being interviewed by a so-called “progressive” TV show. Rage, pain, repugnance, disgust," said Rahola. "You don't interview Nazism. You fight it. Disgust, pain, anger," she went on.

La Sexta's promotion for the interview, which it entitles "The Cub Extremists": "She is the new face of fascism. She admires Hitler. She denies the Holocaust. Who is Isabel Peralta, the Falange member who paid tribute to the Blue Division?

In fact, the young neo-Nazi, who undertook a 10-month stay in the German city of Düsseldorf through a kind of "scholarship" from the neo-Nazi group Der III Weg ("The Third Way") "to learn propaganda and combat techniques," has this week appeared in a demonstration of this organization, featuring flaming torches. If it's not her - since the mask she's wearing prevents absolute confirmation - it looks a lot like her, according to Catalan anti-fascist activist Xavier F. Domènech.

Peralta

The demonstration where the Spanish neo-Nazi was said to have appeared was in Wunsiedel (Bavaria), at which some people wore jackets with the slogans "National, revolutionary, socialist" - an attempt to dodge the ban on Nazi symbols in Germany. The motto of the march was "Remember the heroes. Only those who are forgotten are dead," in a calculated reference to the Nazis.