The Anti-Defamation League said that it was “appalled” after Khalid Turaani, Ohio region executive director of the Council on American–Islamic Relations, said before the Ohio state Senate that Israel operates the “largest human skin bank in the world.”

“Where do you think they got all this skin from,” he said. “They have more human skin than China and India. They are literally skinning the dead bodies of my brothers and sisters in Palestine. That is where they are getting the human skin from.”

“If I call them ‘Nazis,’ your law is going to punish me,” he told the state Senate, which was discussing SB 87, a bill that seeks to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s widely used working definition of Jew-hatred.

The ADL said that it is “appalled that the CAIR-Ohio executive director falsely accused Israel of skinning Palestinians before the Ohio State Senate.”

“The antisemitic organ harvesting myth plays on the blood libel trope, which has spurred the torture, murder and expulsion of Jews for centuries,” the ADL said. “It continues to fuel violence against Jewish communities today. Such hateful, utterly false rhetoric has no place in our state Capitol.”

The Biden administration initially included CAIR, which blamed Israel for being attacked on Oct. 7 shortly after the Hamas-led terror attacks, in its national strategy to fight Jew-hatred but subsequently removed it.

Texas has designated CAIR as a terror organization, and some members of Congress are asking the IRS to investigate its tax-exempt status.