(JTA) — The foreign minister of Romania called on his country’s judiciary to prosecute the parties responsible for the airing of a Christmas carol about burning Jews.
Titus Corlatean made the statement Thursday following an international uproar over the public broadcaster TVR3’s television transmission last week of a song by the Dor Transilvan ensemble celebrating the Holocaust.
“I publicly express my legitimate expectation that the relevant institutions, the National Audiovisual Council (CNA), the National Council against Discrimination (CNCD), the General Prosecutor’s Office, as well as the specialized committees of Parliament will take the necessary measures and investigate, punish and prevent” such situations, the foreign minister’s statement read.
The statement followed harsh condemnations of TVR3’s airing of the carol and the broadcaster’s claims that it was not to blame because the musical selection was compiled by a cultural arm of the western Cluj County.
The carol featured the lyrics: “The kikes, damn kikes, Holy God would not leave the kike alive, neither in heaven nor on earth, only in the chimney as smoke, this is what the kike is good for, to make kike smoke through the chimney on the street.”
The Israeli embassy in Bucharest called the carol and its broadcasting “reprehensible, worrisome” and “capable of boosting anti-Semitism in Romania” in a statement. The statement also expressed the hope that Romanian authorities take “appropriate measures so that such incidents do reoccur.”
In a statement sent to JTA by the Romanian Embassy in Israel, Corlatean added, “I consider it utterly unacceptable that in the 21st century anti-Semitism should further be manifest in various forms.”
Romania, he added, “has a good legislative framework with respect to fighting anti-Semitism, the denial of the Holocaust and promotion of personalities guilty of war crimes” and “has undertaken, for over a decade now, a coherent and conscious effort at reconciliation with the past and recovering our own history.”
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