ROME (JTA) — A Rome court has sentenced a man to six months in jail for having posted a list of 162 academics on his blog and describing them as members of an alleged "Jewish lobby."
In a verdict handed down April 8, Paolo Munzi, 42, was convicted of defamation. But he was acquitted of having violated privacy laws and a law against instigating racial hatred.
In February 2008, Munzi posted a list of 162 people, most of them university professors, and described them in negative terms as members of a Jewish lobby supporting Israel. Some of the professors on the list were not Jewish but had signed pro-Israel petitions. The blog had links to far-right and anti-Israel Web sites, calls to boycott Israel, and Holocaust deniers.
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