World News in Brief

Holtz quits as Team Israel’s baseball manager

Eric Holtz, the manager of Israel’s national baseball team over the past four years, has stepped down from his post.

Team Israel failed to medal in the recently concluded Tokyo Olympics, finishing fifth with a squad of nearly all Americans, including former major league all-star Ian Kinsler. Some predicted that Israel, making its Olympics debut, would finish in the top three of the six-team field.

Team Israel was also forced to apologise after a video of its players breaking a bed at the Olympics went viral on TikTok.

French police detain woman for antisemitic poster

Police in France detained a woman for carrying a sign widely deemed antisemitic at a demonstration against COVID-19 emergency measures.

Cassandre Fristot, an activist for the far-right National Rally party, held up a brown cardboard poster at the rally on Saturday, 7 August, in Metz condemning President Emmanuel Macron and several well-known Jewish people as “traitors”.

Advocate for interfaith-dialogue says Jews should be killed

A Muslim imam in Norway who has led interfaith-dialogue projects has made antisemitic statements on Facebook, including that Jews are dangerous and “should be killed”, for years.

The Norway branch of Minhaj-ul-Quran, an international Muslim organisation considered moderate and geared toward outreach, suspended Noor Ahmad Noor indefinitely on Monday, 9 August, following an expose published last week by the Vartland newspaper on his antisemitic statements. Noor served for years as the branch’s director.

In a short statement to Norwegian media, Noor said, “My posts were published in frustration over attacks in Gaza. Innocent children and women were killed. My criticism and frustration should have been directed at the regime and not against a group of people. I apologise.”

Scientist beaten by assailant seeking to ‘finish Hitler’s job’

An 82-year-old prominent scientist was assaulted on a bus in Moscow by a much younger assailant who shouted that “Hitler should have finished the job, so I’ll do it for him.”

The assailant began hitting Vladimir Tselin, a researcher of radiation who has worked on the Russian space programme, soon after Tselin boarded a bus on his way to work on 6 August, the news site MK reported. Shouting about Jews and Hitler, the man followed Tselin out of the bus after he got off to escape.

Podcaster gets almost three years for antisemitic remarks

A British podcaster who made antisemitic statements was sentenced to 32 months in prison.

The Truro Magistrates’ Court on Friday handed down the sentence to Graham Hart, 69, two months after he pleaded guilty to a charge that he “insulted Jewish people with antisemitic language with the aim of inciting racial hatred”, the Crown Prosecution Service reported on its website.

Separately, talkSPORT, a popular radio station in the United Kingdom, apologised for airing and not immediately confronting a statement by a caller on 3 August who repeated an antisemitic trope.

The caller suggested that the Tottenham Hotspurs, a London soccer team that is often associated with Jewish people, won’t let a soccer player, Harry Kane, out of his contract with the team because the team’s chairperson, Daniel Levy, “is a Jew, he’s not going to let him [Kane] go for nothing, is he?”