The spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has had to apologise for an online post that compared Israel to the Nazis.

Miqdaad Versi, director of media monitoring for the MCB, deleted his tweet and insisted he had made a mistake after he provoked anger with the controversial post.

Tweeting about the death of activist Denis Goldberg, Mr Versi described him as a “strong supporter of Palestinian rights who called Israel an apartheid state & compared the Palestinians’ oppression (by Israel) to that of the Jewish people (by the Nazis).”

A leading campaigner against South African apartheid, Mr Goldberg was sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Nelson Mandela and spent 22 years in jail. He never made a comparison between Israel and the Nazi regime.

Challenged about the post, Mr Versi first changed the tweet to remove the offensive analogy then later issued an apology.

“I am genuinely sorry,” he said, “I had misunderstood what was meant in this video & have deleted the tweet as a result of the error.

“I didn’t make the comparison but made an error in interpreting this video.”

Established in 1997, the MCB is Britain’s biggest and most powerful Islamic organisation: an umbrella body made up of 500 mosques and other Islamic groups.

The previous Labour government cut ties with the Muslim Council of Britain in 2009 following a row about extremism in which the council refused to condemn a senior official who signed a public declaration in support of Hamas, although John Denham as Communities Secretary did meet them.

Subsequent Conservative governments have reinstated the boycott.

The Council has lobbied against proscribing Hamas and is a vocal critic of the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy.

An MCB report on the current Prevent review is due to be published shortly but the Council has already condemned the appointment of William Shawcross to lead the review.

A 2015 government review into the extremist Muslim Brotherhood, concluded it “played an important role in establishing and then running the MCB” while a 2005 Panorama investigation found that groups affiliated to the MCB had promoted antisemitic views and the belief that Christians and Jews were conspiring to undermine Islam.

Contacted by the JC, Mr Versi explained how he had incorrectly interpreted Mr Goldberg’s views and said he deleted the post and apologised “as soon as it was pointed out to me”.

He added: “For the avoidance of doubt, I do not believe it is right to compare the Israeli treatment of Palestinians — however horrific it might be — to the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. Referencing how other people have made other forms of comparisons, may be of interest to some, but is actually not very relevant to the argument I was making.”