A far-right lawmaker in Poland said that natural selection in pogroms have made Jews powerful, and that “there are theories” that rabbis provoked violence to achieve this.

Janusz Korwin-Mikke made the comment in an interview for the Polsat channel last week about the coronavirus, the Do Rzeczy newspaper reported Wednesday.

“Jews are now powerful because they had pogroms,” he said. “As a result of pogroms, the strongest and the most gifted survived. This is a warning to antisemites: That is why Jews are powerful, because they had pogroms. There are even theories that rabbis deliberately provoke pogroms precisely so that Jews survive and then there is natural selection.”

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Korwin-Mikke, a former lawmaker in the European Parliament and a leader of the Confederation Liberty and Independence party, has a history of making antisemitic statements and stunts.

In 2019, he aired a conspiracy theory about Jews while commenting on reports in the Israeli media on a custom in which residents of the town of Pruchnik beat with sticks an effigy of an Orthodox Jew representing Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus.

Korwin-Mikke’s party has 11 seats out of 460 in the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament.