Shorts: U.S.

Did government pressure AIPAC?

washington (jta) | Prosecutors pressured AIPAC to cut off two employees charged with dealing in classified information, lawyers said in a motion to dismiss the case.

The brief filed Tuesday, July 18 alleges that prosecutors conditioned their decision to drop an investigation of AIPAC's agreement to fire Steve Rosen, the group's foreign policy director, and its Iran analyst, Keith Weissman, and to stop paying the pair's lawyers.

Lawyers for Rosen and Weissman swore in depositions that AIPAC lawyers and senior staff informed them of these developments in conversations in March 2005, when Rosen and Weissman were fired, and that they subsequently acted as the government had asked. They also said they confirmed those terms in conversations with prosecutors.

The brief says the pressure to cut off payment for Rosen and Weissman's defense amounts to interference in their constitutional rights. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office did not return calls. Patrick Dorton, a spokesman for AIPAC, called the brief "a significant distortion."




Former Nazi guard to be deported

washington (jta) | The U.S. government moved to deport a Wisconsin man who admitted to Nazi crimes.

Alice Fisher, an assistant attorney general, announced Friday, July 14, that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security asked a federal immigration judge in Chicago to deport Josias Kumpf, 81.

A charging document filed with the immigration court asserts that Kumpf served as an armed SS Death's Head guard at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Germany; at the Trawniki SS Labor Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where 8,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered in a single day in 1943; and at construction sites in France at which prisoners built launching platforms for German missiles.




Gay Jew pays for Christian campaign

indianapolis (jta) | A Jewish businessman is paying for an ad campaign calling for Christian tolerance of gays.

The Metropolitan Community Churches, a largely gay Christian denomination, chose conservative central Indiana for the first of what it says will be a nationwide series of ad campaigns. Billboards read, "Would Jesus discriminate?"

Paying for most of the $100,000 campaign is Mitchell Gold, a furniture designer from North Carolina and gay Jewish activist. "I've suffered a good amount of discrimination by people holding up their Bible," Gold told the Associated Press.