Just days after it was reported that an Italian developed iPhone application, iMussolini, was gaining up to a 1,000 downloads today it was revealed that the service has been withdrawn. Allowing downloaders to access video, audio and text of 100 Benito Mussolini speeches, the application had previously come under large criticism from the Jewish community and Holocaust survivors.

Mussolini, who came to power in 1922 and quickly aligned himself with Nazi Germany, became a fascist dictator and changed the country’s history forever. Developing the application, Luigi Marino expressed that he in no way endorsed the historic moves, but simply aimed to bring Italian history out of the libraries and onto phones. However, widespread criticism from a number of groups was quick to rise after it was reported that the software had become the quickest downloaded iPhone application in the country, even surpassing Avatar’s mobile phone game.

Explaining that he had received a number of legal threats, Mr Marino said that he had been forced to remove the application. Of particular concern was the source of the photos used for the program, which the film institute raised issue with. While Apple declined to make a comment on the matter, the film institute expressed that the application was an aberration and that the clips of Mussolini were in no way providing any educational purpose. Meanwhile Mr Marino said that he hoped to reintroduce the application when the current legal threat was cleared up.

Rome, Jan 29 (IANS/AKI) Vandals have defaced the walls of a Rome museum, which celebrates the resistance to Nazi occupation, with graffiti that calls the Holocaust ‘zionist propaganda’.

The site of the Historical Museum of the Liberation was used as a prison by Nazis during the occupation of the city until it was liberated by Allied troops in 1944.

Police have opened an investigation into the possible involvement of extreme right-wing groups who sprayed the anti-Semitic scribble as Pope Benedict XVI and Italian political leaders prepared to mark Holocaust Remembrance day on Wednesday.

Swastikas, Celtic crosses and graffiti denouncing leaders of Rome’s Jewish community, the city’s mayor Alemanno, Israel and the US were also sprayed onto walls of buildings in the area.

The Nazis killed almost all the 1,000 Jews deported from Rome in 1943.

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s supreme leader predicted the destruction of Israel in comments posted on his Web site on Wednesday, in some of his strongest remarks in years about the Jewish state.

In the past, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called Israel a “cancerous tumour” that must be wiped from the map, but the new comments mark the first time in years he has openly speculated about Israel’s demise.

“Definitely, the day will come when nations of the region will witness the destruction of the Zionist regime,” Khamenei was quoted as saying. “How soon or late (Israel’s demise) will happen depends on how Islamic countries and Muslim nations approach the issue.” He did not elaborate.

Khamenei, who made the comments during a meeting with the Mauritanian president on Tuesday, also accused Israel of trying to destroy the Palestinians “through continued pressure, blockades and genocide.” He said the Jewish state will not succeed.

Khamenei’s comments come as the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi-run Auschwitz death camp.

Iran does not recognize Israel, and the two countries have been bitter enemies since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, and current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel’s destruction.

Tehran is accused of supporting Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim militant group, Hezbollah, which fought Israel until it withdrew it soldiers from southern Lebanon in 2000. Hezbollah continues to launch occasional attacks against Israeli troops in a disputed strip of land on Lebanon’s southern border. Iran also backs Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the Gaza Strip.

Council of Europe decries political hate speech

October 19, 2009

BUDAPEST (JTA) — The Council of Europe called on the major Hungarian political parties to keep racist hate speech out of an upcoming election campaign.

Responding to an appeal by the Jewish community, the call by the 47-member council was made last Friday following a fact-finding mission to Hungary led by Thomas Hammarberg, the council’s human rights commissioner. The next parliamentary elections are due within months.

The Wiesenthal Center, a consultant to the council, asked for an inquiry this fall following several provocative anti-Semitic demonstrations staged by the resurgent Hungarian neo-Nazi movement.

Hammarberg held talks in Budapest last week with Peter Feldmajer, president of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Religious Communities, as well as Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai and several government officials.

The commissioner expressed concern over manifestations of increasing racism and intolerance in Hungary targeting Jews and other minorities, and the lack of appropriate condemnation and effective counter measures by the authorities. He called on leaders of the major political parties to disassociate themselves from hate speech uttered by their followers.

Feldmajer shared his concern with Hammarberg during the meeting, in which they discussed the proliferation of hate speech in Hungarian political discourse.

read more here.

The transformation of Germany in the 1920s and ’30s from the nation of Goethe to the nation of Goebbels is a specter that haunts, or should haunt, every nation.

The triumph of Nazi propaganda in this period is the subject of a remarkable exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (where I serve on the governing board). Germany in the 1920s was a land of broad literacy and diverse politics, boasting 146 daily newspapers in Berlin alone. Yet in the course of a few years, a fringe party was able to define a national community by scapegoating internal enemies; elevate a single, messianic leader; and keep the public docile with hatred while the state committed unprecedented crimes.