The Union of Italian Jewish Communities asked the Chief Magistrate of Florence today to examine a viciously anti-Semitic article distributed by a minor Italian news agency to determine whether the author should be prosecuted for “incitement to hatred and apology for genocide.”
The “Orbis” agency, an Italian news agency with central offices in Florence, credited the article to Luigi Mosciano, its Rome correspondent, who sent the material from Munich, West Germany.
Mosciano attacked the handful of Jews in West Germany in explicit Nazi terms, asserting that they were “getting each day more aggressive” and “creating around them an atmosphere of repressed hatred which some day will explode in a new Hitlerian era. This, in synthesis, is the Jewish situation in West Germany.”
The article charged West German Jews with a “monopoly” of German trade” and asserted that the Jew in Germany, “as elsewhere, is considered ‘money-sick.’ He wants to earn without limits with any means. Germany is now crowded with Jews. It can be stated that it belongs to the Jews. The Germans who before the present time felt compassion toward this race, which had so many sufferings, now feels a sense of revulsion and fear,” The article also attributed to unidentified Jews some of the crimes of which the Nazis were guilty.
Rome’s newspaper, “II Paese,” urged the Italian judicial authorities to undertake a thorough investigation of the “Orbis” news agency and urged that both the agency and the author be prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred. It was learned that the news agency is not recognized by the Press Association of Tuscany. Umberto Foti, its editor, applied for membership in the Italian Journalists Union but his application was rejected.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
