Struggle
06-02-2008 / Canada
Canada - court hands rare Internet hate crime conviction
A Canadian court handed down a rare conviction to a white supremacist for posting hate material on the Internet, and
blog, police here said.
A judge ruled that Keith Francis William (Bill) Noble, 31, did "willfully promote hatred against identifiable groups, namely Jews, Blacks, homosexual or gay persons, non-whites and persons of mixed race or ethnic origin," said a police statement.
Noble was sentenced to four months in jail, plus restrictions on his use of computers for three years, said the police statement. He was charged after police raided his former home in the rural community of Fort St. John.
Monday's conviction by the British Columbia Supreme Court in western Canada, following a two-week trial last fall, is unusual, Sergeant Sean McGowan told. "The conviction rate for Internet-related crimes is very low."
"This is the second conviction of an individual for hate propaganda in British Columbia, and there have been only four or five cases in all of Canada where an individual has been prosecuted and convicted for hate over the Internet," said McGowan.
McGowan said police were tipped off about Noble's posting by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, an international human rights organisation.
Nobel "posted quite a bit on a lot of white supremacist websites," said McGwan. "The content of the website and the content of what he posted were offensive enough to meet a high standard."
Noble "was known to the police, the authorities, and to our organization," said David Eisenstadt, a spokesman for the Wiesenthal organization.
"We're pleased this (conviction) has happened, not because we condone censorship but because there's a lot of abuse on the Internet," Eisenstadt said. "There are no boundaries on the Internet."
Source: http://news.theage.com.au
Date: February 6, 2008
06-02-2008 / United States
USA - Prayer for conversion of Jews remains troubling despite vatican changes
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said the
Vatican's changes to the Latin Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews amount to "cosmetic revisions" and the prayer remains "deeply troubling" because it calls for Jews to "acknowledge Jesus Christ as the savior of all men."
Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement:
While we appreciate that some of the deprecatory language has been removed from a new version of the Good Friday prayer for the Conversion of Jews in the 1962 Roman Missal, we are deeply troubled and disappointed that the framework and intention to petition God for Jews to accept Jesus as Lord was kept intact.
Alterations of language without change to the 1962 prayer's conversionary intent amount to cosmetic revisions, while retaining the most troubling aspect for Jews, namely the desire to end the distinctive Jewish way of life. Still named the "Prayer for Conversion of the Jews," it is a major departure from the teachings and actions of Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul II, and numerous authoritative Catholic documents, including Nostra Aetate.
ADL
wrote
to Pope Benedict on January 22 expressing concern that a revised Good Friday prayer that Jews abandon their own religious identity, would be devastating to the deepening relationship and dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.
Source: www.adl.org
Date: February 6, 2008
05-02-2008 / Italy
The Vatican - Pope removes 'anti-Semitic' text from prayer
The Pope is to rewrite the Good Friday prayer in the traditional Latin Missal to remove derogatory references to Jews after protests that they could damage relations between the faiths.
The prayer in the rite's Good Friday liturgy reads: "Almightily and everlasting God, you do not refuse your mercy even to the Jews; hear the prayers which we offer for the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from their darkness."
Source:
www.telegraph.co.uk
Date: Feb 5, 2008
By Jonathan Petrel
05-02-2008 / Hungary
Hungary - Teens admit to cemetery vandalism
The boys, aged 15 and 16, painted swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti on the gravestones. They also admitted to similar attacks last month on a Holocaust memorial and a store owned by Chinese immigrants.
The attack on the cemetery in Kaposvar, 120 miles southwest of Budapest
Source:
www.jta.org
Date: Feb 5, 2008
05-02-2008 / Ukraine
Ukraine – The Ukrainian President is committed to treat anti-Semitism
Chairman of the Jewish agency Zeev Bialsky has meat the Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko, and discussed with him the issue of anti Semitism in the Ukraine. The president has expressed his deep commitment to tackle the anti Semite occurrences in the Ukraine. Other participants In the meeting were the General Manager of the Israeli Foreign Ministry Aharon Abramowitz and the Israeli Ambassador to the Ukraine Mrs. Zina KLittman.
The Jewish Agency Chairman thanked the president for his visit to Israel lately and brought up the severeness of the anti-Semitism problem and xenophobia existing in the country during the discussion the issue of the MAUP college was brought up “This a an academic Institution who is openly preaches to anti-Semitism. I am sure that this is not with the president’s and the government’s consent this is why actions should be taken to stop the spread of these messages” said Bialsky.
President Yuschenko stressed the commitment to act in the matter and detailed the operative steps his government has taken in dealing with the issue
Source:
http://www.inn.co.il/
Dated 5.2.2008
By Elia Shilo
Photo: Ukrainian President spokesman office
04-02-2008 / Britain
Britain - Students from every school in Britain to visit Auschwitz
Two pupils from every school in England are to visit Auschwitz in a Government-funded initiative to spread understanding of the Holocaust among the younger generation, the Department for Schools has said.
Teenagers chosen for the visits will meet survivors of the Nazi concentration camp where more than a million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other persecuted minorities were killed during the Second World War.
They will be shown around the camp's barracks, gas chambers and crematoria, and see documentation and piles of victims' shoes, clothes and hair.
Announcing the £4.65 million programme, schools minister Jim Knight said he hoped the students, aged 16 to 18, would help to educate their classmates on their return home by giving their own accounts of their experience.
The visits to Auschwitz will be preceded by seminars in which students will hear testimony from a survivor of the camp.
Source: www.express.co.uk
Date: February 4, 2008
03-02-2008 / Germany
Germany – A district Parliament in Germany has removed a Neo-Nazi leader
Yesterday, the Parliament of the District State Mecklenburg at west Pomerania in Germany, has removed the Neo-Nazi party leader Udo Pastors, after expressing himself against Jews immigration to Germany. Udo Pastors, the leader of the NPD party in the District Parliament, demanded to hold a discussion on “the true price of the immigration”, during the speech he carried he attacked the “Parasites” and criticized the Jewish immigration to the state. The Parliament Chairman Renate Holznagel, first cautioned Pastors and later decided to holt the discussion. Shortly there after Holznagel, announced that Pastors will have to leave Parliament until the end of that day’s discussions.
Source: www.haaretz.co.il
Dated 3.2.2008
02-02-2008 / United States
USA - Arrest in vandalism at Jewish cemetery
Mariusz Wdziekonski, a member of a neo-Nazi group has been arrested for allegedly vandalizing nearly 60 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in Illinois this month.
Mariusz Wdziekonski, a 21-year-old Norridge, Ill., man apparently worked alone when he allegedly spray-painted anti-semitic slogans and swastikas at Westlawn Cemetery in Norwood Park Township near Chicago Jan. 6.
The suspect reportedly was trying to impress other members of a neo-Nazi group, said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart.
Source: www.earthtimes.org
Date: Feb 2, 2008
02-02-2008 / Canada
Canada - New trial ordered for native chief Ahenakew
Canada's Saskatchewan province has ordered a second hate crimes trial against former native chief David Ahenakew.
Ahenakew, 74, who called Jews a "disease" and justified the Holocaust during a 2002 newspaper interview, was convicted three years later of willfully promoting hatred against Jews. Last month, a higher court upheld his appeal and ordered a new trial.
The Canadian Jewish Congress said in a statement last Friday it would have preferred that the appeals decision be made in the Supreme Court of Canada but added that it welcomes a new trial.
Source: www.jta.org
Date: Feb 2, 2008
01-02-2008 / New Zealand
New Zealand – Israel ambassador criticizes news article
Yuval Rotem, also Israel’s envoy to Australia, said the column Herald on Sunday by Matt McCarten, a former left-wing political activist, was the worst he had read in his 21-year diplomatic career.
“We have every intention to pursue it in the highest possible manner, including with the owners of the newspaper,” Rotem told.
“The fact that the newspaper is giving a platform to someone to spread hatred and incitement of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel feeling is outrageous.”
Source: thejc.com
Date: Feb 1, 2008
By Dan Goldberg
01-02-2008 / Brazil
Brazil - Judge bans Holocaust Carnival float
A brazilian judge barred a samba group today from featuring a Holocaust display and a dancer dressed as Adolf Hitler in its Carnival parade after fierce complaints from Jewish groups.
State judge Juliana Kalichszteim ruled the Viradouro samba group, or school, would be subject to a $US110,000 fine for the float and $US28,000 for the Hitler impersonation if it went ahead with its original parade plan.
"Carnival should not be used as an instrument of hatred, any kind of racism and clear trivialisation or barbaric and unjustified acts against minorities," the judge said.
Viradouro planned to feature a tableau of a pile of dead model bodies when it marches in the Sambadrome stadium on Sunday night.
The globally televised parades, led by virtually naked Carnival queens and featuring thousands of dancers and drummers, are the highlight of the celebrations in Rio de Janeiro.
The official script also said an actor would pose as Nazi leader Hitler on the float.
Viradouro officials said they have not yet received the judge's ruling and would decide later whether to appeal.
The Israelite Federation in Rio de Janeiro state was the first to object earlier this week and was later joined by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a prominent international Jewish human rights group.
Some six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, an extermination program carried out in World War Two by Nazi Germany.
Source: www.news.com.au
Date: February 01, 2008
01-02-2008 / Germany
Germany - Germany Launches Comic Book on Holocaust
German schools will launch a comic book next week that aims to teach above all underprivileged children about the Nazi era and the Holocaust.
Although German schools already make a big effort to give pupils a thorough education about the Nazi era, racist violence remains a problem, and the revival of Germany's Jewish community has brought a rise in anti-Semitism with it.
The Tintin-style comic book is called "The Search", and tells the story of Esther, a fictional Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.
Created by the Dutch cartoonist Eric Heuvel, it is already available in the Netherlands. Berlin's Anne Frank Centre, which is backing the project, thinks it will serve a purpose in Germany, too.
"There is not a major gap in the way Germany teaches the history of this era, but this is a new approach," said spokeswoman Melina Feingold, noting that the book could reach some of the children who are least interested in schoolwork:
"We hope the comic will get even underprivileged kids interested in learning about the Holocaust."
The 61-page book, already available in various European languages, will be used alongside worksheets in history classes at secondary schools in Berlin for six months, after which the project hopes to go nationwide.
The book, based on fact, describes how Jews in Germany and the Nazi-occupied Netherlands experienced the genocidal Nazi persecution that took the lives of 6 million European Jews.
It includes the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938, when Jews were beaten and their homes, businesses and synagogues were ransacked and, later on, the deportations to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Through pictures and realistic dialogue, the book depicts the suffering and humiliation that Jews endured as they were stripped of their livelihoods, ostracised and, finally, sent to camps to be worked to death or gassed.
After five decades when it had only a handful of Jewish residents, Germany now has the world's fastest growing Jewish community, with 220,000 arriving from the former Soviet Union since 1990.
But violent anti-Semitic crime is also increasing. Last month, five Jewish teenagers were attacked by a group of punks and subjected to anti-Semitic abuse.
The new comic book is a sequel to Heuvel's "The Discovery", also aimed at school children, based on Jewish history in Europe from 1933 to 1940.
Source: www.javno.com
Date: February 01, 2008
30-01-2008 / Poland
Poland - Prosecutor to start investigation into priest controversial remarks
A Polish prosecutor will start an investigation into the controversial statements made last year by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, the founder of Radio Maryja, a Catholic radio station known for its anti-Semitic broadcasts, press reports said.
The decision to start an investigation, decided by a court in Torun, is a response to a complaint by a Polish Jewish organization against the anti-Semitic statements that were made by, or attributed to the priest.
He also reportedly denounced Poland's President Lech Kaczynski as a "fraudster who is in the pockets of the Jewish lobby."
The priest has denied making the inflammatory remarks but popular magazine Wprost claims to have a recording of Rydzyk’s statements.
Jewish group had called on Pope Benedict XVI to condemn the statements and to discipline Father Rydzyk and his broadcast outlet.
Source:
http://www.ejpress.org/
Date: Jan 30, 2008
29-01-2008 / Ukraine
Ukraine- Kiev synagogue vandal detained
A special Ukrainian Secret Service unit reportedly detained a man who attempted to vandalize Kiev's main synagogue.
The incident reportedly took place overnight Saturday, when the vandal was caught by a field investigator for the Secret Service unit on the counteraction of xenophobia and intolerance as he attempted to paint anti-Semitic graffiti on the synagogue walls.
During an interrogation that day, the would-be vandal reportedly confessed that someone had offered him money to vandalize what used to be known as the Brodsky Synagogue.
The Secret Service turned over the case to local authorities; it was unclear what charges the vandal would face. Ukrainian courts often prosecute cases of ethnic violence as hooliganism to avoid Ukraine’s hate crimes statute, which carries more stringent penalties.
Source:
www.jta.org
Date: Jan 28, 2008
29-01-2008 / United States
USA - Israel, UN release stamp to remember the Holocaust
For the first time, the United Nations and Israel have jointly issued an International Holocaust Remembrance Day stamp.
The day itself was marked on Monday following a UN decision in 2005 to launch an annual memorial. The stamp, designed by internationally known graphic artist Matias Delfino.
The stamp was a joint project of the Israel Postal Company's Philatelic Service and the UN's philatelic service. The image is of two white-and-yellow flowers, the stems of which meld into barbed wire like that on the fences in concentration camps. The postal sheet, which contains nine identical stamps, has a quote from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon relating to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for the destruction of Israel.
Ban is quoted as saying that one can never allow the denial of historical facts, especially when it relates to such an important matter as the Holocaust. “One can never permit a call for the destruction of a nation or a state”, he says. "I hope that all members of the international community will honor this basic principle, both by word and by act."
Date: Jan 29, 2008
29-01-2008 / United States
USA - MTV videos take look at Holocaust
It’s a typical rush hour and commuters are crammed into a subway car, when the train slams to a halt.
Suddenly, soldiers with dogs and machine guns order everyone off the train and into two huge lines on the platform.
“That could be the Green Line, and those people could be us,” said Roger Baldacci, an executive vice president at the Boston advertising agency Arnold Worldwide, and one of the creative minds behind two new jarring videos about the Holocaust.
The 30-second spots use contemporary images and scenes to teach young people about the Holocaust.
Unfortunately, Baldacci said, many of today’s youth don’t know about the Holocaust. So Arnold used an in-your-face, educational approach to let kids know about it.
In another video, a contemporary family is hanging out at home. As the daughter begins her homework, her mother prepares dinner.
Suddenly, soldiers burst into the home, and force the family outside and into a truck, where they join other bewildered people who’ve been taken from their homes.
“It’s reframing the Holocaust for young people, to let them know what it would be like in today’s terms,” Baldacci said. “We want them to know that the Holocaust happened to people like us.”
Source:
http://news.bostonherald.com
Date: January 29, 2008
By Christine McConville
Photo by MTV
27-01-2008 / United States
USA - Bush: World must go on condemning anti-Semitism
In a statement issued by the White House for the International Holocaust Memorial Day, US President George Bush called upon the world to go on condemning anti-Semitism.
"I was deeply moved by my recent visit to Yad Vashem," said Bush. "Sixty-three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must continue to educate ourselves about the lessons of the Holocaust, and honor those whose lives were taken as a result of a totalitarian ideology that embraced a national policy of violent hatred, bigotry, and extermination."
"Today provides a sobering reminder that evil exists and a call that when we find evil we must resist it.”
"May God bless the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. And may we never forget."
Date: Jan. 27, 2008
27-01-2008 / Britain
Britain - Muslim group to take part in U.K. Holocaust Memorial Day
For the first time ever, representatives of Great Britain's largest Muslim umbrella organization will take part Sunday in the international Holocaust Memorial Day. Two months ago, the Muslim Council of Britain (MBC) decided to put an end to their six year boycott of the Memorial Day. The international Remembrance Day was first instituted by the UN in 2001 on the day - January 27th - that the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated by the Allied forces.
The official ceremony will take place in Liverpool, however their will be commemorative ceremonies through out the country. U.K. chief Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks and the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams will speak at the memorial service.
The MBC's decision to take part in the Memorial Day comes after they were harshly criticized of anti-Semitism by Jewish groups and the British government.
"The decision was taken because staying away was doing more harm than good and being misconstrued," a MCB spokesperson told The London Times last month.
Source: www.haaretz.com
Date: Jan 27, 2008
By Cnaan Liphshiz
25-01-2008 / United States
USA - Man who intervened in subway attack on way to D.C. to hear Bush's address
A good Samaritan who intervened in a subway fight is headed to Washington to hear the President's State of the Union address firsthand.
"It's definitely one of the biggest honors," said Hassan Askari, a Muslim who tried to stop the Christmas-vs.-Chanukah fisticuffs.
Askari jumped into the Dec. 7 brawl on the Q train, defending two couples he did not know who were pelted with anti-Semitic slurs and beaten because they had said "Happy Chanukah."
source: www.nydailynews.com
date: January 25, 2008
By Melissa Grace
25-01-2008 / Germany
Germany - Merkel attacks "middle-class anti-Semitism"
Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany must tackle disguised "middle-class anti-Semitism" and attacked those who were silent about the country's painful past.
Speaking ahead of a memorial day for victims of the Nazi era nearly 75 years after Adolf Hitler's party came to power, Merkel said that while anti-Semitism was often linked to poorer communities, the middle-class was also to blame.
"I see, in the educated classes, a more disguised form of anti-Semitism, that is not so readily defined," Merkel told a conference, describing it as "a form of middle-class anti-Semitism".
"There is, in broad parts of the population, an awful silence when faced with all the historical images, with our own history, and this silence is always a danger".
Source: http://in.reuters.com
Date: Jan 25, 2008
By Sylvia Westall
