Shorts: World

Neo-Nazi sentenced for Net hate

toronto (jta) | A Canadian judge sentenced an unrepentant neo-Nazi to nine months in prison for ignoring an injunction against spreading hate over the Internet.

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled in April this year that Tomasz Winnicki of London, Ontario, had violated the Canadian Human Rights Act with his posting.

Winnicki, 30, had been enjoined by a federal court against posting hate-filled messages since last October, when the human rights tribunal first began considering the case. This month, the tribunal asked the court to consider Winnicki in contempt because his postings had continued.

Winnicki's postings "have the same vile content and the unrelenting message of hatred for Jews and contempt for people of the Black race and/or immigrants," Justice Konrad von Finckenstein wrote July 12. "He has shown no remorse for his contempt."




Latvian pamphlet aims to reduce hate

riga (jta) | Latvian officials released a booklet aimed at ending anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.

The publication is a collection of views expressed at a Latvian religious conference held during a state-sponsored diversity and equality week in April. The publication captures views from Latvian poets, theologians and politicians on topics such as tolerance within Latvian society, Judaism and Islam, and Islamophobia within the European Union.

The booklet is part of a wider anti-discrimination project sponsored by the European Community Action Program designed to bring the new EU member states up to EU standards on government policies toward racial discrimination and intolerance.




Australia blasted on war crimes inaction

melbourne (jta) | An Australian Jewish official said his country's government lacked the political will to prosecute an alleged Nazi war criminal.

In an interview with the Australian Jewish News, Shmuel Rosenkranz, president of the Holocaust Museum and Research Centre, criticized the government for not charging Lajos Polgar, a leader of the Arrow Cross, a wartime fascist organization in Hungary that tortured and killed thousands of Jews and helped the Nazis round up Jews for deportation to death camps.

Polgar, who lived in Australia, died at age 89 of natural causes earlier this month. He had admitted being a commander of the Arrow Cross.




Memorial defaced near Babi Yar

kiev (jta) | A Ukrainian memorial to World War II-era killings was vandalized.

The vandalism occurred over the weekend near Babi Yar, where 33,000 Jews were killed in September 1941.

Altogether, an estimated 100,000 people were killed there during the war. The vandalism occurred a few months before the 65th anniversary of the massacre will be observed.




Jack the Ripper —was he a Jew?

london (jta) | The lead detective in the "Jack the Ripper" case believed the notorious London serial killer was a Jewish barber.

Handwritten notes by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson appear in the margins of a memoir by Robert Anderson, the assistant police commissioner. Swanson's descendants, who donated the book to Scotland Yard's museum on July 13, said the detective was certain Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jewish barber, was his man.

Kosminski previously had been mentioned as one of a number of suspects in the gruesome series of killings of prostitutes in late 1880s London. Kosminski died in 1919 in an asylum.