He tells them what they want to hear - that the war in Gaza is a genocide that is the worst in history.
He said in the interview that history “will condemn everyone who stood silent in the face of the bloodbath now flowing in the Gaza Strip, which exceeds all the massacres of history,” including, he said, the Holocaust.
In reality, Friedman was never chief rabbi of Austria, and he does not appear to have even ever been ordained.
He attended the infamous Holocaust denial conference in Iran in 2007 and embraced then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At the conference he said he didn't deny the Holocaust, but claimed that only one million Jews perished - which indeed makes him a Holocaust denier.
The Austrian Jewish community then excommunicated him, forcing him to move to Boro Park in Brooklyn.
There Friedman and his family moved into two apartments but refused to pay rent for two years. It appears he was evicted as a result, and then moved to Antwerp in 2011, where the schools refused to admit his children because of his noxious views on the Holocaust.
The supposedly religious "rabbi" then sued to allow his boys to attend an all-girls Belzer hasidic Jewish school. He lost that case on appeal.
This is the "rabbi" that Al Jazeera is pretending is a respected scholar and religious figure.
