Shorts: World
Thursday, April 23, 2009 | byU.N. pulls badges from Jewish NGOs
The United Nations pulled credentials from a number of Jewish activists who disrupted a speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Durban Review Conference in Geneva.
Of the 46 badges that were pulled this week for disruptive behavior, the vast majority were from individuals accredited through Jewish organizations. Notably, the French Union of Jewish Students lost 21 badges.
Credentials were stripped as well from four members of the European Union of Jewish Students and one B’nai Brith member. Between them, the French and European Jewish student groups had 370 members accredited, amounting to more than one-third of all the non-governmental organization activists at the conference.
U.N. officials said they believed Jewish activists who already had their credentials pulled swapped badges with members of another group, Coexist. — jta
Shoah revisionist guilty in Australia
A notorious Australian Holocaust revisionist has been found guilty of criminal contempt for continuing to publish offensive material about Jews.
Fredrick Toben, 64, of the Adelaide Institute in South Australia, was convicted on 24 of 28 counts of “deliberate and calculated disobedience” of a 2002 Federal Court order to stop publishing material denying the Holocaust, doubting the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and vilifying Jews.
In the Federal Court in Adelaide on April 16, Justice Bruce Lander found in favor of Jeremy Jones, a former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who launched the legal action in 2006 after Toben had continued to publish anti-Semitic material.
Toben was jailed for two months last year in London while German prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to extradite him on a European Union warrant. In 1999, he spent seven months in prison in Germany, his birthplace, for inciting racism. In 2006 he spoke at a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran attended by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
A hearing on Toben’s penalty will take place next week. — jta
Survey: Sharp rise in anti-Semitism
A new survey shows that anti-Semitism worldwide rose sharply in early 2009 after a decrease in 2008. The survey, conducted by the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University in cooperation with the European Jewish Congress, was released April 20 on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day and at the start of the Durban II anti-racism conference.
The start of Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip on Dec. 27, 2008, brought into 2009 a wave of anti-Semitic manifestations throughout the world, the report said.
The anti-Semitic incidents included both violent incidents such as arson attacks on synagogues, assaults on Jewish individuals, desecration of cemeteries, and vandalizing of Jewish property and Holocaust monuments, as well as verbal and visual expressions such as insults, threats, caricatures and violent demonstrations. Although most of these activities featured traditional anti-Semitic motifs, their use was more extreme, intensive and vociferous than in the past, the report said.
The survey’s authors estimate that there were close to 1,000 manifestations of all types of anti-Semitism throughout the world in January. Many of the anti-Semitic incidents used Holocaust motifs instead of classic Jewish stereotyping. — jta
New appeal to Jews rescued by Catholics
The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation has launched a worldwide appeal for testimonies of Jews saved by Catholics during the Holocaust. The group is making the appeal ahead of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority May 8 to 15.
The testimonies, according to the Catholic News Agency Zenit in a report this week from Jerusalem, would be “a way to celebrate the presence of the Pope in the Holy Land and the fraternal embrace between Catholics and Jews it symbolizes.” The foundation is named for Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in the Budapest ghetto. — jta
Austrian on trial as Holocaust denier
An Austrian writer has gone on trial for allegedly defending and promoting aspects of the Nazi era and publicly denying the Holocaust.
Gerd Honsik faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of denying the occurrence of the Nazis’ systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews during World
War II.
The 68-year-old author also was being tried on charges of promoting Nazi propaganda. Both are crimes in Austria.
Honsik wrote a book, “Hitler Innocent?”, in which he attempted to justify some Nazi-era crimes. He was originally convicted in 1992 but fled to Spain, where authorities arrested him in October 2007.
Honsik went on trial April 20 in Vienna on new charges for articles he allegedly wrote and circulated on the Internet. — ap