Austrian Airlines fires a flight attendant for chanting anti-Semitic slogans at a far-right rally

• Austrian Airlines, owned by Lufthsana, fired a flight attendant who chanted anti-Semitic slogans on tape.
• Christina Kohl, the former flight attendant, is running for a seat on Vienna's municipal council with a far-right party called Team HC Strache, reported Kurier, a local paper.
• Among her chants caught on tape were "Soros must go," "Rothschild must go," and "Illuminati must go."

Austrian Airlines has fired a flight attendant who was caught on tape chanting anti-Semitic slogans at a far-right political rally last week.

Christina Kohl, the now former flight attendant, is running for a seat on Vienna's municipal council with a far-right party called Team HC Strache, reported Austrian newspaper Kurier. She was affiliated with the party for just three days before she was terminated, on August 13.

Kohl was apparently part of a rally on August 11 at which she chanted various anti-Semitic slogans, including "Soros must go," "Rothschild must go," "Rockefeller must go," and "Illuminati must go."

An Austrian news channel captured the rally and the video was later distributed on Twitter, where one user called out Kohl by name for chanting anti-Semitic statements. Austrian Airlines, which is owned by German airline giant Lufthansa, fired her shortly afterward.

"Austrian Airlines is an international company," Austrian Airlines spokesperson Leo Steinmann said in a statement emailed to Business Insider. "Our core business is to overcome borders."

He added, "We are clearly against anti-Semitism in any form. Statements and behavior of this kind are inexcusable and incompatible with our corporate values. That is why we have drawn a clear line and taken measures to ensure that such things do not happen again."

Kohl, the fired flight attendant, pushed back on the allegations that her chants were anti-Semitic. She said in an interview with Kurier, the Austrian newspaper, that she critiqued Jewish people as well as non-Jews.

"I feel pushed to fight for freedom of expression even more now," Kohl told Kurier.

Businessman George Soros, who is Hungarian-American and Jewish, is a frequent target of anti-Semitic and white supremacist hatred. Most recently, white supremacists blamed the billionaire for "pulling the strings" on worldwide demonstrations around the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by Minneapolis police.

The Rothschild family is also the target of many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which center on the idea that wealthy Jewish people are somehow controlling global events and profiteering off of them.

The Illuminati also concerns the idea that a group of people, though not necessarily Jews, secretly control the world. The Rockefeller comment connects to the wealthy American family whose fortune comes from John D. Rockefeller, who founded Standard Oil in 1870. This family is not Jewish.