The political office of the Florence Police Headquarters officially expressed the opinion that the author of an anti-Semitic article distributed by the "Orbis" news agency, which has its headquarters here, was guilty of "apology for crime and incitement to hatred."
The political office give this view after a request for action by the Union of Italian Jewish Communities on the article, written by Luigi Mosciano, purporting to be a survey of the status of the remnant of Jews in West Germany, with a Munich dateline. Mosciano attacked the West German Jews in explicit Nazi terms.
The political office said also that "any further decision on the issue is up to the magistrature of Florence." The article, in which Mosciano wrote that West German Jews were "money-sick" and "creating around them an atmosphere of repressed hatred which some day will explode in a new Hitlerian era," has been regarded with concern by Jewish groups and other democratic groups and by police authorities.
This attitude, it was explained, does not stem from the status of the news agency, which is considered unimportant, but because it seemed to fit in within a general picture of intensified neo-fascist aggressiveness and symptoms of Nazi-inspired propaganda in Italy.
Fears have been expressed that such propaganda, unless checked, might be intensified to reach a peak at the start of the trial in March in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, who directed the extermination of the 6,000,000 European Jews, not only in Italy but in other countries as well.
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.
