US congressional candidate calls Holocaust "poppycock”

Arthur Jones, a former neo-Nazi, said the Shoah was an "extortion racket by the Jews to bleed, blackmail, extort and terrorise their enemies and to suck us into one war after another in the Mideast.”

Arthur Jones, a former neo-Nazi who is running for an Illinois congressional seat as the only Republican in his district inveighed against what he called the “Jew-party system” and called the Holocaust “poppycock” in an interview on CNN.

The former leader of the American Nazi Party and the only candidate in the Republican primary for Illinois’ third Congressional district said in an interview on Thursday: “Yes, I deny the Holocaust, if you did any honest investigation of the Holocaust you’d realise that it is nothing but an international extortion racket by the Jews to bleed, blackmail, extort and terrorise their enemies and to suck us into one war after another in the Mideast.”

The interviewer, Alisyn Camerota, challenged Jones vocally and repeatedly, interrupting him and speaking over his fulminations.

“Six million Jews were killed. Adolf Hitler perpetrated a genocide. The Auschwitz death camp existed and the Nuremberg trial happened,” she said.

Jones retorted by saying: “The Jews controlled basically the country, the economy — the economy, the media,” before replying to the reference to Auschwitz in saying “Poppycock.”

The Democrats and the Republicans “are the cursed, two-party, Jew-party, queer-party system — can’t stand it,” he also said.

Jones, 70, is a retired insurance salesman who has been running since the 1990s for the 3rd Congressional District representing parts of Chicago and its southwestern suburbs. He became the only Republican candidate on the ballot as the result of a fluke, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. The primary will be held on March 20.

The national Republican Party and the Illinois Republican Party have disavowed Jones.

Illinois Republican Party Chairman Tim Schneider told CNN that his organization “and our country have no place for Nazis like Arthur Jones. We strongly oppose his racist views and his candidacy for any public office.”