Historian David Starkey has caused fury by branding Alex Salmond a ”Caledonian Hitler”.
There was cross-party condemnation after the controversial academic and pundit known for appearances on the BBC compared the First Minister to the Nazi leader.
Mr Starkey also drew parallels between Mr Salmond’s attitude to the English and Hitler’s views on Jews.
The incendiary claims came on Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, when the country remembers the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis regime.
Ephraim Borowski, director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, said the comments could be seen as ”more offensive” than holocaust denial.
”Coming as it does on Yom HaShoah, the day on which the Jewish world remembers the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the millions of other victims of Nazi prejudice and brutality, his remark is more than just tasteless and insensitive,” he said.
”There are more forms of Holocaust denial and minimisation than merely claiming that it did not occur or arguing about the numbers of victims, and the use of inappropriate and hyperbolic analogies can be even more offensive.”
Mr Starkey was speaking at a debate hosted by the Conservative think tank the Bow Group on the teaching of British history in UK schools.
He said: ”If you think about it, Alex Salmond is a democratic Caledonian Hitler, although some would say Hitler was more democratically elected.
”(For him) the English, like the Jews, are everywhere,” he added to gasps from the audience.
Bow Group council member Nic Conner, who attended the event, confirmed the comments, although he maintained that they had been taken out of context.
A spokesman for Mr Salmond, who won an overall majority in last year’s Holyrood election, branded Mr Starkey’s claims ”ridiculous and offensive”.
”This offensive nonsense is actually an insult to Scotland and to the people of Scotland,” he said. ”David Starkey is getting dafter and crankier with every passing day his litany of offensive comments are designed only to provoke outrage, and thankfully England is blessed with a great number of better historians than him.
”We can count ourselves lucky that David Starkey is nowhere near the teaching of history in Scottish schools. In the words of Robert Burns, Scots will ‘look and laugh’ at this nonsense.”
Scottish Labour’s Paul Martin also condemned the remarks.
”These comments are uncalled for and have no place in any political discourse,” he said. ”These are just the latest in a series of wayward ramblings from David Starkey about politics and wider public life which smack of attention-seeking and have left him thoroughly discredited.
”To be honest, I would no sooner ask his advice on matters of state than I would my cat on matters of dentistry.”
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie said the comments mean Mr Starkey should no longer appear on television.
He said: ”If this is the sort of trash he is going to serve up then broadcasters, in particular, should make sure they don’t put him on any TV programmes from now on. He can’t be taken seriously as any sort of academic.”
The BBC received more than 150 complaints in January after Jeremy Paxman compared Mr Salmond to Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe in an interview on the BBC2 TV programme Newsnight.
Photos by PA Wire