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World News in Brief
Fliers declare Holocaust ‘fake news’
Two anti-Semitic fliers that deny the Holocaust were posted at Massachusetts synagogue Temple Emanu-El in Marblehead this week, with reports of similar incidents at synagogues in two other states.
JTA
Police are investigating what the Anti-Defamation League described as a co-ordinated campaign by a national online white supremacist group.
The printed posters, attributed to the Daily Stormer Book Club, refer to the Holocaust as “Fake News. The people that lied about soap and lampshades are lying about gas chambers and ovens,” it said.
Pink defends kids’ behaviour
Jewish popstar Pink has defended a photo she posted of her children running at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.
The singer, whose real name is Alecia Beth Moore, shared photos on Instagram on Sunday from her trip to the German capital. One of the images showed her two young children running among the large stone blocks that make up the vast memorial.
Some commenters said their behaviour was a sign of disrespect at the solemn site. In response, the singer posted, “[F]or all of the comments, these two children are in actuality Jewish … The very person who constructed this believed in children being children, and to me this is a celebration of life after death. Please keep your hatred and judgment to yourselves.”
Egyptian in ‘blood matzah’ libel
A scholar working in Saudi Arabia told an Egyptian public broadcaster that some Jews use blood to make matzahs for Passover.
Fouad AbdelWahed, a professor at King Saud University, repeated the centuries-old canard during an interview for the show Blue Line on Channel 2, part of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union, the Middle East Media Research Institute reported.
Asked where the blood comes from, he said: “By Allah, I don’t know where they get the blood from.” He also said that only “extremist” Jews do this.
Injured teenager joins elite unit
A teenager who as a baby was seriously wounded in a rocket strike from Gaza has been accepted to the Israeli army’s counterpart of the Navy SEAL (sea, air, and land) unit.
The recruit to Shayetet 13 overcame a crippling disability as a result of sustaining 147 shrapnel injuries to his body at the age of 16 months in 2002, when a Qassam rocket from Gaza exploded in his backyard in Sderot. News reports from that incident identify him as Shilo Naamat.
Shayetet 13 is considered among the best special forces outfits in the world. It has participated in some of the Israeli army’s most daring operations, including the transport of Ethiopian Jews from Sudan in the 1980s. It’s often employed against Hamas in Gaza.
Minister refuses to shake hands
Israeli Education Minister Rafi Peretz, under fire for his support of “conversion therapy” for gays and for calling assimilation among United States Jews a “second Holocaust”, has been criticised for not shaking hands with a teenage girl at an official event.
Peretz on Sunday gave a medal to the teen, Nguyễn Khánh Linh of Vietnam, without shaking her hand at the International Physics Olympiad. He then gave medals to three other boys and shook their hands, news portal Mako reported.
Gadi Taub, an influential right-wing columnist and writer, on Monday called for Peretz to step down following that and other incidents. “You’re extreme, even to many right wingers, not only on gays. An extremist [of any side] shouldn’t be education minister,” Taub wrote to Peretz on Facebook.
‘Daily Stormer’ told to pay damages
The publisher of a neo-Nazi website who instructed readers to troll a Jewish real estate agent must pay the victim $14 million (R195.5 million), a federal judge ruled.
US Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch also recommended that the court order Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer to remove all posts and photos that he used to victimise Montana resident Tanya Gersh, her husband, and her 12-year-old son in 2016.
The website had called on readers to unleash a “troll storm” on Gersh. The threats began after Anglin accused Gersh of trying to force out the mother of a white nationalist from the mountain resort community of Whitefish.
Sarah Jessica Parker in Israel
Sex and the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker is on a private visit to Israel, but that didn’t stop Israeli paparazzi from snapping her photo while she was out for dinner on Friday night in Tel Aviv.
Parker’s father, a native of Brooklyn, is Jewish, descended from a Jewish family from Eastern Europe, and she reportedly identifies as Jewish. Her husband, actor Matthew Broderick, has a Jewish mother.