Swiss gov't employee fired for praising death of Jews

Canton’s construction manager sent email to Israeli Embassy praising Burgas terror attack.

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
MAURUS CANDRIAN 370 (photo credit: atsinfo.sg.ch)
MAURUS CANDRIAN 370
(photo credit: atsinfo.sg.ch)
BERLIN – The construction department of the St. Gallen canton in Switzerland dismissed a managerial construction employee because he sent an email to the Israeli Embassy in which he praised the deaths of Jews in a terrorist attack.
Candrian wrote in his email about the attack on Israeli tourists in Burgas in July 2012, “That is a good day in my life. I am proud of the heroes who killed Jews.”
Bulgaria’s interior minister concluded last month that two Hezbollah operatives murdered five Israelis and their Bulgarian bus driver.
The large-circulation Blick paper reported on Monday the reasons for the termination of Maurus Candrian, who headed the planning assessment department. His actions damage the reputation and values of the department of construction, as well as the entire administration of St. Gallen (population 480,000), the authorities said.
Candrian, 54, a member and former vice president of the centrist Green Liberal Party, sent an email to Israel’s Embassy celebrating the death of Jews in a terrorist attack. The Candrian case was cited in a 2012 anti-Semitism report in Switzerland.
The state prosecutor in St. Gallen initiated a criminal action against Candrian for racial discrimination. He was sentenced to a fine of 1,200 francs.
Candrian worked at the construction department for 17 years.
He said last week that he regrets sending the email, according to the Swiss news wire service SDA. He added that he formulated his criticism poorly and wanted to criticize Israel’s Middle East policies and did not want to injure Jews in any way. Candrian apologized in a letter to the Israeli Embassy.
Green politicians have been engulfed over the years in anti-Semitism scandals.
Swiss Jewish leaders, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Swiss journalists criticized MP Geri Müller, a politician with the center-left Green Party (separate from the Green Liberal Party), during his election campaign in February for the mayor of Baden, because he supports close ties with Hamas and engages in pro-Iranian regime activities.
“We criticize Müller’s closeness to anti-Semites and to Islamic Hamas, which denies Israel’s right to exist,” Jonathan Kreutner, the general secretary of Switzerland’s 18,000-member Jewish community, told The Jerusalem Post at the time. “His relationship to the Iranian regime, as well as his playing down of Iran’s efforts to go nuclear is also problematic, as Iran has repeatedly propagated the [idea of the] destruction of Israel. We also severely criticize his participation in a demonstration several years ago, in which the Star of David was compared with a swastika and he compared the situation in the Gaza Strip with the Holocaust.”
Writing in the Basel-based Basler Zeitung, an editor with the prominent paper, Dominik Feusi, wrote in February “there is anti-Semitism on the political Left. In Switzerland this anti- Semitism is, above all, Green, as the statements from Müller demonstrate.”
Feusi also slammed Green Party MP Daniel Vischer for stoking anti-Semitic sentiments in the country. Vischer, who is head of the Swiss-Palestinian Society, in 2010 termed Israel “an illegal atomic state” and a “rogue nation.” Feusi said the language of the party “reveals a deeply anchored hate toward Israel and Jews, and the representative examples are from the Green Party in Switzerland.”
The Islamic Central Council of Switzerland complained of a “Jewish lobby” organizing a campaign against Müller, who won the mayoral election.