MP George Galloway has emphasised that his Respect Party “abhors and campaigns against racism” after being alerted to comments by a party officer questioning whether Adolf Hitler was “the bad guy”.

Naz Kahn, who last week was being praised on Facebook for her selection as a new woman’s officer for Respect, made the comments on the same site on September 30.

Responding to a video called The Palestine you need to know, she said: “It’s such a shame that the history teachers in our school never taught us this but they are the first to start brainwashing us and our children into thinking the bad guy was Hitler. What have the Jews done good in this world??”

She later added: “No, I’m not a Nazi, I’m an ordinary British Muslim that had an opinion and put it across. We have worse people than Hitler in this world now.”

Ron McKay, a spokesman for Mr Galloway, who was elected as MP for Bradford West in March, said that Ms Kahn’s comments, made less than a month ago, appeared on an unofficial site before she was a member of the party.

“Since joining Respect and talking with George and other leading figures, she now deeply regrets and repudiates that posting,” he said. “And, as any view later in the thread will confirm, she has praised seminal Jewish figures.”

He added that Respect was built on its opposition to racism and said that Mr Galloway regularly “praises the massively important role of Jews in world history”. Last week, at the Oxford Union, he had “reiterated that the Holocaust was the worst crime in history”.