Cop who once won 'Officer of the Year' award under investigation for anti-Semitic posts praising 'Hitler the Great'

A Cleveland police officer who was awarded the title of "Officer of the Year" in 2019 is being investigated for anti-Semitic social media posts, the Cleveland Jewish News reports.

The posts that were allegedly made by Officer Ismail Quran have since been removed from Twitter.

“The City of Cleveland, Division of Police is aware of a matter involving a Cleveland Police Officer and inappropriate social media posts," Cleveland Police said in a prepared statement. "The matter has been referred to the Cleveland Division of Police Internal Affairs Unit for thorough investigation and the officer is currently assigned to administrative duties."

In a tweet posted in 2014, Quran wrote, “F*** that Jew” July 14, 2014 and included an image of Adolf Hitler with the caption reading, “Let me salute to Hitler the Great. He said ‘I would have killed all the Jews in the world, but I kept some around to show why I killed them,’” according to the watchdog group Canary Mission.

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The tweet was up on the platform until only recently when Canary Mission started highlighting Quran's tweets. On June 17, the tweets were made private. In another 2014 post, Quran explained that he was referring to "Zionists," not Jews -- a common line of rhetoric employed in anti-Israel circles. In another tweet the following day, Quran posted another image of Hitler, writing, “...I don’t salute this man, but what is happening to us, is what happened to the Jews by Hitler.”

Quran's anti-Israel and anti-Jewish tweets range from 2011 to 2015.

“It is a cause for genuine concern that the Cleveland Police Department is employing an officer with a record of antisemitic hate speech,” Canary Mission’s statement reads. “We were further shocked and dismayed to discover that the Cleveland Police Department honored Quran despite his many years of disseminating truly vile antisemitic content on social media. We urge swift action by Mayor Justin Bibb, Interim Chief of Police Dornat Drummond, and the Cleveland Community Police Commission to remove such a dangerous antisemite from his duty.”