Semitic

The German soccer federation condemned an anti-Semitic act involving Kaiserslautern's Israel striker Itay Shechter and says it will not tolerate such abuse. A small group of Kaiserslautern fans directed Hitler salutes at Shechter during Sunday's practice. The German soccer federation's designated president Wolfgang Niersbach says such abuse has to be "nipped in the bud" and "we must act decisively. " The club's official fan group has apologized for the situation. The club says fewer than 10 fans were involved and belonged to a hooligan group banned from games.

Holocaust Remembrance Day always falls during the week that follows Passover. At first glance, the two would seem to have little in common — one memorializes the millions of European Jews annihilated by Nazi Germany; the other commemorates the deliverance of the Jews from slavery in ancient Egypt. Yet for all their obvious differences, a fundamental similarity links these two crucial chapters in Jewish history. Both were attempts at genocide — and in both cases the perpetrators justified their savageries by claiming that they were the real victims, threatened by the...

JERUSALEM — A new Iranian website that denies and mocks the Holocaust with cartoons showing Jews as hook-nosed worms burrowing holes through a history book provoked outrage in Israel yesterday. Holocartoons.com features caricatures, including a Jew with a hook nose and a black hat emblazoned with a Star of David tracing fake bodies on the ground at a concentration camp. The website uses Nazi imagery, with the icon for flipping pages marked with a swastika. “The vulgar and cynical approach of the website, a combination of Holocaust denial and distortion, illustrated with anti-Semitic...

ACCORDING TO the Associated Press article "No signs French gunman tied to militant groups" (Page A3, March 24), investigators in Paris found that Mohamed Merah, the cruel assassin of young Jewish children who filmed while he shot his innocent victims point blank, was not "under orders from Al Qaeda or any militant group. " However, millions of young Muslims are fed a steady diet of anti-Semitic rhetoric from their imams and leaders. If inflammatory, demonizing, and dehumanizing lies are filling airwaves, speeches, and websites, is it any wonder that radical Islamists don't need...

ESPN has removed fantasy leagues with anti-Semitic names from its website after the Simon Wiesenthal Center pointed them out. The Jewish human rights organization is praising the sports network for quickly responding to its complaint, which it brought to ESPN's attention on Wednesday. The Wiesenthal Center says that among the offensive team names were "Jews are Immoral" and "Jews Are Terrible. " Network spokesman Josh Krulewitz said that while ESPN has systems in place to protect against inappropriate team and league names "clearly with millions of users and deceptive...

ACCORDING TO the Associated Press article "No signs French gunman tied to militant groups" (Page A3, March 24), investigators in Paris found that Mohamed Merah, the cruel assassin of young Jewish children who filmed while he shot his innocent victims point blank, was not "under orders from Al Qaeda or any militant group. " However, millions of young Muslims are fed a steady diet of anti-Semitic rhetoric from their imams and leaders. If inflammatory, demonizing, and dehumanizing lies are filling airwaves, speeches, and websites, is it any wonder that radical...

MADRID - The Anti-Defamation League said yesterday that a survey it commissioned found nearly a third of Europeans polled blamed Jews for the global economic meltdown and that a greater number thought Jews have too much power in the business world. The organization, which says its aim is "to stop the defamation of Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment to all," says the seven-nation survey confirms that anti-Semitism remains strong. The poll, conducted between December and last month, included interviews with 3,500 people - 500 each in Austria, Britain, France,...

JERUSALEM -- Like moviegoing masses around the world, Israelis have crowded theaters to watch the hit spoof "Borat. " But they are laughing for another reason: They actually understand what the anti-Semitic, misogynist Kazakh journalist is saying. Few realize that comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's wacky comedic creation, Borat Sagdiyev, is not speaking Kazakh or even gibberish, but rather Hebrew. The 35-year-old British comedian is no stranger to Israel. He is an observant Jew, his mother was born in Israel, and his grandmother still lives in Haifa.

BUCHAREST, Romania — The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says the refusal of Romania’s central bank to withdraw a coin bearing the image of a prime minister who stripped Jews of their citizenship before World War II is “insensitive’’ to the memory of Holocaust victims. The Anti-Defamation League also condemned the decision and urged President Traian Basescu yesterday to ensure that information about the anti-Semitic actions of Miron Cristea is included with each coin.

PARIS -- European neo-Nazis post online pictures of paint-smeared mosques. Websites of Islamic radicals call for holy war on the West. Aliases like "Jew Killer" pop up on Internet game sites. International specialists met yesterday in Paris to tackle the tricky task of fighting anti-Semitic, racist, and xenophobic propaganda on the Internet, seen as a chief factor in a rise in hate crime. Purveyors of hate have found a potent tool in the Internet, spreading fear with such grisly images as the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.

The German soccer federation condemned an anti-Semitic act involving Kaiserslautern's Israel striker Itay Shechter and says it will not tolerate such abuse. A small group of Kaiserslautern fans directed Hitler salutes at Shechter during Sunday's practice. The German soccer federation's designated president Wolfgang Niersbach says such abuse has to be "nipped in the bud" and "we must act decisively. " The club's official fan group has apologized for the situation. The club says fewer than 10 fans were involved and belonged to a hooligan group banned from games.

MSNBC dropped conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on Thursday, four months after suspending him following the publication of his latest book. The book "Suicide of a Superpower" contained chapters titled "The End of White America" and "The Death of Christian America. " Critics called the book racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic, charges Buchanan denied. MSNBC President Phil Griffin said last month that he didn't think Buchanan's book "should be part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.

Istvan Csurka, a Hungarian anti-Soviet dissident playwright and later far-right nationalist politician who was criticized at home and abroad for his anti-semitic articles, died Saturday at age 77. Csurka's death was announced by his family. He had been hospitalized in recent weeks with an undisclosed illness, but no other details were immediately available. Often compared to France's xenophobic National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, Csurka opposed Hungary's membership in NATO and the European Union, but his political activities dwindled after a...

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by two Jewish students who claimed the University of California, Berkeley, fostered an atmosphere of anti-Semitism by not doing enough to curb alleged harassment during pro-Palestinian protests that included mock checkpoints. Plaintiff Jessica Felber claimed in the lawsuit that a leader of a campus pro-Palestinian group rammed her with a shopping cart as she staged a counter-protest to "Apartheid Week," an annual event that compares Israel's policies to the institutionalized racism of South Africa's former white...

NEW YORK - Dozens of residents marched through a Brooklyn neighborhood yesterday to protest vandals who torched three cars and scrawled Nazi swastikas in an area populated by Orthodox Jews. Protesters said they were stunned after unknown vandals set the cars ablaze, spray-painted the letters "KKK" on a van, defaced four public benches with 16 swastikas, and left other anti-Semitic messages on a sidewalk in the Midwood neighborhood before dawn on Friday. Police have made no arrests.

More than 500 people gathered at Faneuil Hall last night to hear a panel of community and civic leaders discuss recent trends in anti-Semitism and a poll showing its rise over the past two years . An ADL-commissioned poll released last week showed a 3 percent rise in anti-Semitism in the United States since 2009. The poll numbers indicated that 15 percent of Americans hold deeply anti-Semitic views. "Anti-Semitism still exists. It's threatening. It's global," Abraham H. Foxman, the ADL's national director and a Holocaust survivor, said in an interview after the event.

PARIS -- Arsonists destroyed a Jewish community center in eastern Paris before dawn yesterday, leaving behind red graffiti with anti-Semitic messages such as "Jews get out. " Flames gnawed away the wooden doors and blackened the walls of the center, a meeting place for the elderly and disadvantaged located on the ground floor of a six-story building. Rescue workers said the center was gutted. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and other top officials visited the center, the latest target in a wave of anti-Jewish attacks in France.

MSNBC dropped conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on Thursday, four months after suspending him following the publication of his latest book. The book "Suicide of a Superpower" contained chapters titled "The End of White America" and "The Death of Christian America. " Critics called the book racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic, charges Buchanan denied. MSNBC President Phil Griffin said last month that he didn't think Buchanan's book "should be part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.

NEW YORK - Emanuel Litvinoff, an English-born Jewish poet known for his scathing verse indictment of T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism and for reading it before an audience that included Eliot, died Sept. 24 at his home in London. He was 96. His son Aaron confirmed the death. The author of several volumes of poetry, Mr. Litvinoff also wrote well-received novels centering on the struggles of Jews in the European diaspora. He was the author of "Journey Through a Small Planet" (1972)