"We are talking about a musical event which gathered more than 40,000 people and we would like to disregard politics in this case. HTV is a public and not a state television, so the government has no say over its programmes," Vela said in a statement shown in the prime time news.
The press release signed by the director of the Centre's Jerusalem office, Efraim Zuroff, said the concert Thompson held at Zagreb's Maksimir stadium on June 17 was an impudent display of traits of Croatian Nazism, antisemitism and xenophobia.
Zuroff also said that broadcasting the concert footage on HTV meant that the Croatian government approved the messages of hatred because HTV was a state television.
Commenting on that claim, government spokesman Ratko Macek told Hina "the Croatian government has no influence on any medium in Croatia, including HRT (Croatian Radio and Television)".
He recalled that after the concert the government vehemently condemned and dismissed attempts to use and display insignia and salutes from the WWII Ustasha regime.
"Modern Croatia rests on Homeland War values and the foundations of antifascism and resistance to any form of totalitarianism," said Macek.
At yesterday's convention of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), Prime Minister Ivo Sanader recalled that Croatia had not been created on the Ustasha ideology.
"We created it in the Homeland War and on those tenets on which Europe was built, and that was antifascism, of which (Croatia's first president) Franjo Tudjman was a member," Sanader said.