Lithuanian member of parliament Remigijus Žemaitaitis who came under scrutiny several weeks ago for anti-Semitic posts on facebook has stepped up his attacks on Jews during Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė’s working visit to Israel this week, according to Lithuanian media reports.

According to Tele3 news, on Tuesday Žemaitaitis released a new flurry of facebook posts blaming Jews for the Soviet deportation of Lithuanians, claiming Lithuanians experienced a greater genocide than Jews did in the Holocaust and blaming Jews for this alleged genocide. He published a list of alleged Jewish perpetrators of Lithuanian genocide and claimed Soviet Jewish partisans had committed mass murder in Pirčiupiai, a village in southern Lithuania near the town of Varėna. He also referred to Jews as “a subspecies,” presumably of Homo sapiens and presumably meaning subhuman.

Besides misspelling the name of the village, historian Algimantas Kasparavičius told Tele3 news he got the facts wrong: a Nazi SS unit destroyed that village and murdered 119 inhabitants on June 3, 1944, as revenge for several German soldiers murdered by Soviet partisans in the area.

Žemaitaitis’s latest comments were condemned by the Lithuanian prime minister Šimonytė, speaker of parliament Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, the Israeli ambassador to Lithuania and Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky. He was expelled by his party over the earlier round of remarks and the Lithuanian Prosecutor’s Office is investigating his facebook posts for possible violation of Lithuanian laws forbidding the sowing of ethnic discord. Čmilytė-Nielsen claimed Žemaitaitis was either knowingly or unknowingly being used by “enemy countries” to discredit a NATO meeting scheduled in Vilnius for mid-July. Čmilytė-Nielsen also referred the matter to the Lithuanian parliament’s Ethics and Procedures Commission for possibly removing Žemaitaitis’s status as a member of parliament.

PM Šimonytė said there should be no tolerance of anti-Semitism in Lithuania.

LJC chairwoman Kukliansky told Tele3 evening news it was strange Žemaitaitis claimed it was ethnic Jews who were behind the Soviet deportations in early June of 1941. Historians agree a higher percentage of Jews were deported than the percentage of the Lithuanian population sent to Siberia and Central Asia by the Soviets.

According to the news website Delfi.lt, Žemaitaitis was angered by the prime minister’s statements made during her visit to Israel claiming close relations and historical ties with the Jewish state, and sought to set the record straight on facebook.

Full story in Lithuanian here.