Jewish leaders in Scotland have condemned a man following the emergence of a video in which he teaches his girlfriend’s dog commands using anti-Semitic phrases.
The clip, in which a dog called Buddha responds to instructions such as ‘Gas the Jews!’ from its 28-year-old master, the former security guard Marks Meechan, has been watched more than 750,000 times.
Meechan has taught the dog raise a paw when he says ‘Sieg Heil’, the salute the Nazis used. Meechan says at the end of the video that the purpose of the video was to annoy his girlfriend Sue.
The Scottish Council of Jewish Communities condemned the man and said: "Anti-Semitism is not something that can in any degree be regarded as a joke. It is a form of racism which needs to be condemned just as we would any other form of racism, just as we would condemn Islamophobia or anti-African racism."
The council's director, Ephraim Borowski, said Meechan’s claims that he was not a racist was not credible. "To regard the meticulously planned and industrialized murder of six million people solely on the grounds of their ethnicity as a joke is outrageous, and for someone who does so to claim not to be racist, beggars belief," Borowski said.
