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Member of Goyim Defense League extradited to Netherlands after allegedly projecting antisemitic message onto Anne Frank House
(JTA) – A prominent member of an American neo-Nazi group has been extradited to the Netherlands, where he will stand trial for projecting an antisemitic message onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
Robert Wilson is accused of being behind a February incident in which a message was laser-projected onto the house where Anne Frank hid during the Holocaust. The message read “inventor of the ballpoint pen,” a reference to a widely debunked antisemitic conspiracy theory alleging that Frank’s famous diary is a forgery because it was originally written with a ballpoint pen, which was invented only after World War II.
Frank was discovered by the Nazis in 1944 and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp the following year. The house where she hid is now a museum.
Wilson is scheduled to make his first court appearance in early October. Originally from Canada, he is a member of the Goyim Defense League, a prominent neo-Nazi group now based in Florida.
Wilson lived in Chula Vista, California, a suburb of San Diego, from 2016 to 2021, when he was accused of assaulting a neighbor and targeting them with homophobic slurs. Soon after the alleged assault, Wilson was accused of hanging an antisemitic banner over a San Diego freeway overpass. He fled the country before he could be prosecuted for a hate crime in the assault.
Since then Wilson has been largely based in Poland, where he holds citizenship, and has documented himself committing various antisemitic acts, including displaying vulgar signs directed at the Anti-Defamation League while outside the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 2022. Goyim Defense League founder Jon Minadeo Jr. also posed in the same photo, which Minadeo said led to his arrest by Polish authorities.
Wilson reportedly traveled to Amsterdam several months later, at the time of the Anne Frank House incident. His presence there was discovered by a group of Dutch citizen sleuths devoted to rooting out terrorist activities.
In the spring, the Netherlands issued a European arrest warrant for him, and Polish authorities first arrested him in April, ordering him not to leave the country while the investigation was ongoing. But Wilson was arrested again in July while trying to flee to Canada from an airport in Germany. He was held in Germany before being transferred to Amsterdam in late August.
In July the Netherlands outlawed speech that specifically takes the form of Holocaust denial, but Dutch prosecutors did not indicate in their press release announcing Wilson’s extradition what they would be charging him with.
The unclear nature of the projected message will be a “test case” for the Netherlands, Willem Wagenaar, an extremism researcher who works at the Anne Frank House, told San Diego’s inewsource.
“Is this a punishable offense in the Netherlands, or is this freedom of speech?” Wagenaar said. “It’s in the gray area in between. So we will find out.”
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The post Member of Goyim Defense League extradited to Netherlands after allegedly projecting antisemitic message onto Anne Frank House appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency
The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.
They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.
State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.
Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.
Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.
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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation
Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family
i24 News – The body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.
Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.
“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.
“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.
“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”
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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack
A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24
i24 News – The stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.
Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.
The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.
“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”
“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”
Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.
After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.