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The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) is calling on President Obama to publicly condemn the anti-Semitic call for jihad against Israel by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie. The SWC also called for Obama to cut off all contact with the Muslim Brotherhood until the threat is retracted. Al Ahram, Egypt’s largest newspaper, reported Badie’s speech in which he said: "The Jews … have spread corruption on earth, spilled the blood of believers and in their actions profane holy places, including their own." Badie urged Muslims to confront Israel “through holy jihad, high sacrifices and all forms of resistance …...

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has apologized for "a serious breach of protocol" in which the parents of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal were posthumously baptized as Mormons.

The conflict between the US-based Wiesenthal Center and Malmö mayor Ilmar Reepalu has taken another acrimonious turn after he was accused of anti-Semitism and echoing "conspiracy theories against Jews in the 1930s". Following a five-day visit to Malmö in southern Sweden, one of the Wiesenthal Centre's representatives, Dr. Shimon Samuels, has penned a letter in which he forwards strongly worded criticism of Reepalu, according to the local Sydsvenskan daily. Samuels has taken offence over Reepalu's comments after Monday's meeting in which he said the responsibility for policing was a matter for the police and the justice ministry in Stockholm. One...

Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff is fighting libel charges filed by an alleged war criminal in Hungary. The case, being heard in a Budapest courtroom, began Oct. 8 and is scheduled to continue through a final hearing Dec. 16.It is likely the first time that a man under investigation for mass murder has sued his accusers, Zuroff told JTA. Zuroff, who has been searching for Nazi war criminals under the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Operation Last Chance program, submitted documents to the Hungarian authorities in August 2006 to prove that Sandor Kepiro, while serving as a Hungarian gendarmerie officer in World War...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by militant and hate groups grew by almost 20 percent in the past year, a report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center found on Monday. The study, using research by the center and tips from the public, found more than 11,500 social networks, websites, forums and blogs promoting violence, anti-Semitism, homophobia, hate music and "terrorism," an increase from 10,000 last year. "The numbers are probably, at the end of the day, multiples of that," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center's associate dean who has been...

The founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center voiced dismay and disappointment Monday at weekend Vatican moves to raise controversial wartime pope Pius XII to sainthood. The Vatican sparked anger in Jewish communities worldwide with moves to nudge Pius -- whose beatification process was launched in 1967 -- closer to sainthood, its ultimate honor. The Catholic Church argues that Pius saved many Jews who were hidden away in religious institutions, and that his silence during the Holocaust -- when millions of Jews were exterminated by Germany's Nazi regime -- was born out of a wish to avoid aggravating their situation. But...

In one corner you have the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance (the Wiesenthal Center’s educational arm). The museum teaches people to confront bigotry and racism, and to understand the Holocaust in both historic and contemporary contexts. The Seattle Police department has contracted the center's professional development programs which include Tools for Tolerance, Teaching Steps to Tolerance, Task Force Against Hate, National Institute Against Hate Crimes, and How Not to Racial profile. In the other corner you have the domestic terror group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The FBI has proven CAIR to be involved with the terrorist group...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Militants and hate groups increasingly use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube as propaganda tools to recruit new members, according to a report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The report released on Wednesday noted a 25 percent rise in the past year in the number of "problematic" social networking groups on the Internet. The report was based on "over 10,000 problematic Web sites, social networking groups, portals, blogs, chat rooms, videos and hate games on the Internet which promote racial violence, anti-semitism, homophobia, hate music and terrorism." "Every aspect of the Internet is...

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has doubts about reports that a wanted Nazi doctor is dead, according to reports. The New York Times and German television station ZDF reported Wednesday that Aribert Heim, known by the moniker "Dr. Death," hid for 30 years in Cairo using the name Tarek Hussein Farid and died there of cancer in 1992. Heim is said to have killed hundreds of concentration camp inmates by injecting gasoline into their hearts. He also documented surgeries performed without anesthesia. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal Center's Israel office, told several news outlets Thursday that the human rights and...

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has received leads that "Dr. Death" Aribert Heim, the center's most wanted Nazi war criminal, is alive and living in Patagonia, Chile. The center's chief Nazi hunter is due to travel there this week. The hunt for "Dr. Death" Aribert Heim, the Nazi war criminal wanted for murdering hundreds of prisoners in concentration camps during World War II, has intensified after the Simon Wiesenthal's chief Nazi hunter received fresh leads during a visit to South America. Efraim Zuroff, a Holocaust historian who heads the center's Jerusalem office, told media that he had received information that Heim...

The hunt for Heim has taken investigators from the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg all around the world. Besides his home country of Austria and neighboring Germany where he settled after the war, tips have come from Uruguay in 1998, Spain, Switzerland and Chile in 2005, and Brazil in 2006, said Heinz Heister, presiding judge of the Baden-Baden state court, where Heim was indicted in absentia on hundreds of counts of murder in 1979. Thousands of German war criminals were prosecuted in West Germany after World War II. In the 1970s Western democracies began a hunt in earnest for Eastern European...

An estimated six million Jews were murdered in the Nazi death camps A "final effort" is under way in South America to track down and prosecute ex-Nazi war criminals before they die.Operation Last Chance - a scheme devised by the Simon Wiesenthal Center - attempts to locate Nazis in hiding. It takes the form of a media campaign and offers financial rewards for any information that results in conviction. The four countries involved are Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil - where large numbers of Nazis are thought to have fled following World War II. 'Important results' The operation -...

WASHINGTON - The State Department said Monday it would revise a portion of its Web site after a Jewish group accused it of minimizing the Holocaust and Germany's role. The department's special envoy for Holocaust issues said a section of the site devoted to "background notes" on Germany would be altered following a protest from The Simon Wiesenthal Center. The center said the entry omitted key information. "We intend to change the language in order to more accurately reflect historical facts," said the envoy, J. Christian Kennedy. The department's Bureau of European Affairs, which compiled the section on Germany that...

The Simon Wiesenthal Center today criticized the removal from the center of Tallinn to a military cemetery by the Estonian government late last week of a Soviet memorial commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany, which had stood for decades in the center of the Estonian capital. In a statement issued in Jerusalem by its chief Nazi-hunter, Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Center noted that the removal of the monument minimizes the severity of the crimes of the Holocaust in Estonia and insults the Nazis‘victims in the country. According to Zuroff: “While the Center unequivocally condemns the crimes committed against...

In reaction to your 25,000 signed petitions that were sent to former US President Jimmy Carter protesting his book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Mr. Carter has responded. In a hand-written letter to Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Center’s dean and founder, President Carter accused the Center of "falsehood and slander." Rabbi Hier responded, in part, "Let me say, Mr. President, that I am not one who believes that Israel is infallible ... the only reason there is no peace in the Middle East is because of Islamic extremists who refuse to compromise, not because of the State of Israel.” Read the...

The Simon Wiesenthal Center called for an international arrest warrant to be issued for the apprehension of Hamas leader and one of Israel's most wanted men, Khaled Mashaal, according to a press release put out by the organization. According to the SWC, Mashaal is the chief architect in the terror campaign against Israel. "The time has come for the United Nations to demand that Syria give up Khaled Mashaal and to issue an international arrest order for his apprehension," wrote Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Center's Founder and Dean, in a letter to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on Thursday....

Addressing British Secretary of State for Education, Alan Johnson, and Universities UK President Drummond Bone, the Simon Wiesenthal Centers Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, called for their action against the British academic boycott of Israeli universities. “The ongoing campaign, last year at the Association of University Teachers (AUT) and this year at the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) to incite to a British academic boycott of Israeli universities - is redolent of the Nazi 1930's 'Kaufen Nicht Bei Juden' boycott of Jewish professionals and enterprises,” Samuels said in a letter to the British...

Simon Wiesenthal Center blasts Estonia Apr 25, 2006 TBT Staff Efraim Zuroff, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which specializes in investigating Nazi war crimes during World War II, called Estonia’s investigation of Nazi crimes a total failure. The report singled out two cases, one involving Venezuela resident Harry Mannil, who the center accused of arresting Jews and communists in German-occupied Estonia, and another involving Mikhail Gorshkov, who moved back to Estonia from the United States in 2002. The center’s F ranking places Estonia in the same company as Romania and Norway.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has urged Germany to declare Iran's president "persona non grata" if he decides to attend this year's World Cup. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has drawn international outrage for labeling the Nazi Holocaust a myth and calling for Israel's destruction. He has not said whether he will travel to the World Cup, where Iran is one of the 32 teams competing. The German government has said a visit would be problematic but that, like other heads of state, he has a right to attend. The Simon Wiesenthal Center expressed its concerns in a letter to Foreign Minister Frank-Walter...

Statement from the Simon Wiesenthal Center on its Jerusalem Project February 19, 2006 You may have read some recent articles in the press regarding the discovery of human remains at the construction site of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Center for Human Dignity-Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. Unfortunately many of these articles are inaccurate and we would like to set the record straight. A group of Islamic organizations petitioned the Supreme Court of Israel to permanently halt the construction of this project on the grounds that it is a Moslem cemetery. Here are the critical points: . The Center for Human Dignity...