German police arrested on Monday one of the 10 most wanted Nazis, 93-year-old Hans Lipschis,  who is facing charges of complicity in murder as a former guard at the Auschwitz extermination camp.

State prosecutors in Stuttgart are preparing an indictment against Lipschis, a native of Lithuania who was a guard at Auschwitz from the autumn of 1941 until the Nazis abandoned the camp in January 1945, according to German news reports.

Lipschis reportedly belonged to the Totenkopf-Sturmbann, or Death’s Head Battalion, that guarded the camp, and he later became a cook for SS troops at the camp.

The Zeit online newspaper reported that Lipschis is one of the “ten most wanted Nazi war criminals.”

Lipschis told the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag last month that he was in Auschwitz “as a cook, the whole time.” He reportedly moved to the United States in 1956 but was expelled in 1982 after immigration authorities determined he had lied about his Nazi past in order to gain entry into the United States.

The arrest has been greeted by the SimonWiesenthalCenter’s top Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff as a positive step.

It follows the announcement last month by Germany’s Central Office for Clarification of Nazi Crimes, based in Ludwigsburg, that it had provided information about 50 former Auschwitz guards to German courts, with the aim of assisting in possible war crimes trials. All the suspects are around 90 years old.

The development was triggered by the 2011 guilty verdict in Munich against former death camp guard John Demjanjuk, as an accessory to murder of nearly 29,000 Jews at Sobibor in Poland. There were no direct witnesses to Demjanjuk having physically committed murder himself, but there was sufficient evidence that he was a guard at the camp.

Kurt Schrimm, who heads the Ludwigsburg agency, told reporters last month that, since the Demjanjuk verdict, “any job in a concentration camp is sufficient evidence towards a conviction as accessory to murder.”

Jewish leaders praised the new Pope Francis, Argentinean Jorge Mario Bergoglio, and expressed optimism for an improvement of Vatican-Jewish relations after he was elected Wednesday night to replace Pope Benedict XVI.

“We have every reason to be confident Pope Francis I will be a staunch defender of the historic Nostra Aetate, the declaration on the relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions of the Second Vatican Council, which forever changed the relationship of the Catholic Church and the Jewish people,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

Bergoglio, 76, a Jesuit, was the choice of the College of Cardinals following two days of voting in Vatican City. He is the first pope to come from outside Europe in more than a millennium; reflecting the changing demographics of Catholics, he comes from Latin America.

Rabbi David Rosen, the director of interfaith affairs for the American Jewish Committee, told JTA that the new pope is a “warm and sweet and modest man” known in Buenos Aires for doing his own cooking and personally answering his phone.

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio attended Rosh Hashanah services at the Bnei Tikva Slijot synagogue in September 2007.  Bergoglio told the congregation that he was there to examine his heart “like a pilgrim, together with you, my elder brothers,” according to the Catholic Zenit news agency.

After the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in 1994, he “showed solidarity with the Jewish community,” Rosen said.

In 2005, Bergoglio was the first public personality to sign a petition for justice in the AMIA bombing and was one of the signatories on a document called “85 victims, 85 signatures” as part of the bombing’s 11th anniversary. In June 2010, he visited the rebuilt AMIA building to talk with Jewish leaders.

Israel Singer, former head of the World Jewish Congress, said he spent time working with Bergoglio when the two were distributing aid to the poor in Buenos Aires in the early 2000s, part of a joint Jewish-Catholic program called Tzedaka.

“We went out to the barrios where Jews and Catholics were suffering together,” Singer told JTA. “If everyone sat in chairs with handles, he would sit in the one without. He was always looking to be more modest. He’s going to find it hard to wear all these uniforms.”

Bergoglio also wrote the forward of a book by Rabbi Sergio Bergman and referred to him as “one of my teachers.”

Last November, Bergoglio hosted a Kristallnacht memorial event at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral with Rabbi Alejandro Avruj from the NCI-Emanuel World Masorti congregation.

He also has worked with the Latin American Jewish Congress and held meetings with Jewish youth who participate in its New Generations program.

“The Latin American Jewish Congress has had a close relationship with Jorge Bergoglio for several years,” Claudio Epelman, executive director of the Latin American Jewish Congress, told JTA. “We know his values and strengths. We have no doubt he will do a great job leading the Catholic Church.”

U.S. President Barack Obama met with more than a dozen representatives of American Jewish communities on Thursday, March 8, in advance of his trip to Israel.  That trip is expected to begin on March 20.

The meeting, which was not on the president’s public list of activities, included a range of political interest representatives, mostly from the centrist to politically left.  Although participants were not supposed to discuss the names of those present or what was discussed, enough information became available throughout the day to draw a general sense of what transpired.

The Anti-Defamation League, solidly centrist enough to be included in virtually every government gathering, was represented, along with several other typical participants such as the American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz was there, as were representatives from the radical leftist Americans for Peace Now and from an organization the political life of which practically began with the Obama presidency, and which seems to be on the decline, J Street, was also represented.  Based on many reports it appears there was no one from the unflaggingly pro-Israel end of the spectrum, such as the Zionist Organization of America.

The meeting participants made suggestions of places to visit and some urged the president to take a stronger stand against Iran.  Obama’s response was reportedly that “Iran needs to be able to climb down without humiliation.”

The topics of Syria, Turkey and Iran were discussed, but several participants said that the primary focus was on the “Israeli-Palestinian peace issue.”  The two day trip will include a two hour trip to Ramallah, during which Obama is expected to meet with PA leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Ardent supporters of Israel had been fearfully speculating over the past week that during his trip President Obama would once again make heavy demands on the Israeli government to engage in unilateral concessions.  Those fears appear to be unfounded.

All reports of the meeting reflected the sense that the U.S. president is conscious of the turmoil throughout the Middle East and the constraints that places on parties in the region.  Obama reportedly said that he has no intention of “delivering a grand peace plan” during this trip.

Perhaps the U.S. president is unwilling to repeat a major failure of his first term, when he practically demanded there be progress on the “peace process,” but, when met with the reality of the situation, had to chalk up that goal as a failed one.

It appears that what has been widely criticized might actually be good news: without an Israeli governing coalition in place, President Obama can point to that instability as the reason for disappointing those who are insistent that peace be made at all costs – even when that cost is guaranteed to mean war.

The single biggest news that came out of the White House meeting is that it appears even President Obama may have actually learned that the conflict in the Middle East has no simple answers.

Who knew that a president’s pronouncement that the possibility for Middle East peace is bleak would be such a welcome statement?

On Thursday, during a visit to Berlin, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles called German publisher Jakob Augstein an anti-Semite. This after the SWC had included comments made by Augstein in its list of the top 10 anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs of 2012, the Spiegel reported.

“Based on his behavior and his words since the release of the list, we can say, yes, we are dealing with an anti-Semite,” Cooper reiterated, explaining that the list was focused on anti-Semitic slurs, not necessarily on the individual.

In Berlin, Rabbi Cooper criticized a column written by Augstein for Spiegel Online on the issue of ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, Jews.

Augstein has witten:

“Israel is threatened by Islamic fundamentalists in its neighborhood. But the Jews also have their fundamentalists, the ultra-orthodox Haredim. They are not a small splinter group. They make up 10% of the Israeli population. They are cut from the same cloth as their Islamic fundamentalist opponents. They follow the law of revenge.”

Cooper said at a Thursday’s forum in Berlin that he wants to know from Augstein how many suicide attacks have been carried out by Haredi Jews within and outside of Israel. Because of their appearance, he said, Haredi Jews were some of the first victims of the Nazi regime. Recently, he said, they have been killed in France and attacked on the streets of Berlin.

Here are the rest of the quotes provided by the SWC in its “2012 Top Ten Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Slurs” (PDF):

“With backing from the US, where the president must secure the support of Jewish lobby groups, and in Germany, where coping with history, in the meantime, has a military component, the Netanyahu government keeps the world on a leash with an ever-swelling war chant.”

“Israel’s nuclear power is a danger to the already fragile peace of the world. This statement has triggered an outcry. Because it’s true. And because it was made by a German, Guenter Grass, author and Nobel Prize winner. That is the key point. One must, therefore, thank him for taking it upon himself to speak for us all.”

“The fire burns in Libya, Sudan, Yemen, in countries which are among the poorest on earth. But those who set the fires live elsewhere. Furious young people burn the American, and recently, the German flag. They, too, are victims, just like the dead at Benghazi and Sanaa. Whom does this all this violence benefit? Always the insane and unscrupulous. And this time it’s the U.S. Republicans and Israeli government.”

“Gaza is a place out of the end of times….1.7 million people live there on 360 sq. kilometers. Israel incubates its own opponents there.”

It may be debatable whether all the above statements are outright anti-Semitic or simply critical, and, indeed, several public individuals have come out in protest of the SWC’s inclusion of Augstein in a list that features Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and the Iranian regime.

“The choice of Jakob Augstein for ninth place on the list of the 10 worst anti-Semites is a serious intellectual and strategic error made by the Simon Wiesenthal Center,” wrote the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Not only has a critical journalist been placed in a group into which he doesn’t belong, the nine other people and groups who have justifiably been pilloried can now exculpate themselves by pointing to such arbitrariness.”

Rabbi Cooper, for his part, said Augstein has had the opportunity to reflect on his statements and to apologize to his German readers and to the Jewish people, which he has not done.

Augstein has rejected the accusations, and the Central Council of Jews in Germany criticized Augstein’s statements, even though the council’s president Dieter Graumann has said that Augstein does not belong on the list, and Council Vice President Salomon Korn said about Augstein: “I never had the impression that what he wrote was anti-Semitic.”

Perhaps the honorable Graumann and Korn could provide that much needed data concerning Haredi suicide bombers.

Like Europeans, Israelis are mad for their soccer.  For some, soccer is the true religion of the Middle East,  one shared by Muslims and Jews alike.

But just as in Europe, not all soccer fans follow the normal rules of civility, and the behavior of some fans of one Israeli soccer team in particular, Jerusalem Beitar, has been reprehensible.  Beitar was the last of the 30 Israeli soccer teams without any Muslim players. The anti-Muslim racism of its fans has led to Beitar being banned from some soccer matches and being fined, as well as having demonstrations by Israelis denouncing their behavior.

When Beitar management last week brought in two Muslims from Chechnya to join the team, the response by the haters was ugly, if not unexpected.  Despite official efforts to celebrate the inclusion of Muslims into the Beitar family as an important Israeli value, some fans responded at a game over the weekend with shameful calls for “Beitar purity,” and unfurled a vicious banner: “Beitar, pure forever.”

But today’s New York Times story about the incident is shocking in its narrow focus and excessive reliance on Israel haters to suggest that the racism of the worst Beitar fans accurately reflects Israeli society.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told The Jewish Press by telephone from Berlin, “You want to know what “mirrors” Israeli society?  Walk in the Mamilla Mall on a Saturday night,  Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews, all strolling, eating and shopping together – that’s the mirror of Israeli society.”

The official response to the boorishness was swift and unequivocal: the team was fined 50,000 NIS ($ 13,400) and 50 of the worst offenders were banned from an upcoming match.

Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon slammed the ugly behavior, saying “I was shocked by the racism displayed in the Beitar Jerusalem stands yesterday against having Muslim or Arab players on the team.”

“We cannot ignore these displays of racism which not long ago were directed – and are still being directed – towards the Jewish people,” he wrote on Twitter.

And in a show of solidarity, Jerusalem’s Mayor Nir Barkat attended the Tuesday press conference welcoming the Muslim Chechen players, Zaur Sadayev and Gabriel Kadiev, who had previously played on the premier Russian team Terek Grozny.

Barkat said, “I want to tell viewers around the world that we will not put up with racism or violence.  This is an ethical statement that goes out from Jerusalem to the world.”

And Beitar’s team captain Amit Ben-Shushan said at the press conference welcoming the new players, “We do not engage in politics.  As far as we’re concerned, we will do our best to welcome the players in the best possible fashion.”

The Russian-born billionaire owner of Beitar, Arkady Gaydamak, rejected the nasty response to the new players, telling Israeli Army Radio last week that the “small group of so-called supporters of the team do not represent the general opinion of the Israeli public, and they should not be allowed to win.”

No one suggests there is no racism in Israel or amongst Israeli sports fans – far from it.  A horrible incident received a lot of attention last spring when Beitar fans, chanting “death to the Arabs” after a game in Jerusalem’s Teddy Stadium poured into the nearby Malha Mall, where Arab workers were allegedly assaulted by some participants.

But the only “experts” quoted in the NYT article are ones whose professional livelihood is built and dependent upon denouncing Israel as a racist society.

For example, Professor Moshe Zimmerman, chair of Hebrew University’s German Studies Department, is quoted as expressing strong support for the article’s headline, that the racist Beitar fans reflect Israeli society.

It might have been useful for readers of the NYT article to know that Zimmerman was chastised by the relatively restrained Anti-Defamation League as far back as 2005, for repeatedly comparing the Israeli Defense Forces and authorities to Nazis.

Yet the NYT writer places Zimmerman as the first expert in the article.  “People in Israel usually try to locate Beitar Jerusalem as some kind of the more extreme fringe; this is a way to overcome the embarrassment,” and Zimmerman continues, “the fact is that the Israeli society on the whole is getting more racist, or at least more ethnocentric, and this is an expression.”

Every year around this time we’re inundated with stories about the top ten people or events of the previous twelve months.  Holding to this tradition, this past Thursday, the Simon Wiesenthal Center published their list of the top 10 anti-Semites of 2012.

Mind you, the list is highly subjective, and, no doubt, when we speak of anti-Semites and haters of Israel, many of you have your own favorites.  But this group is definitely right up there with the worst.  Unsurprisingly, Europe once again is well-represented, as is the Middle East.  Likewise, nothing unifies both the far left and the far right better than Jew-hating, since both groups are well represented in this year’s list.  Without further ado, let’s get into it.

Working backwards at number 10 is long-time favorite and anti-Semite extraordinaire Louis Farrakhan.  In October, he came out with his latest accusations: “In Washington right next to the Holocaust museum is the Federal Reserve where they print the money.”  He asks, “[I]s that an accident?”  In my opinion, that novel remark alone should have earned him a higher rating, but he must have lost points at Wiesenthal for being unimaginative, repeating the age-old mantra that Jews control the media.

Proudly coming in at number 9 is a new one to many: Der Spiegel columnist and editor of the left-wing publication Freitag Jakob Augstein.

In his publications, Augstein frequently castigates Israel’s orthodox community as being akin to Islamic terrorists and sees Israel as a nuclear threat to the world.  In a September interview with the Jerusalem Post, Die Welt columnist Henryk Broder, Germany’s leading authority on anti-Semitism, described Augstein the following way: ”He’s a pure anti-Semite, an anti-Semitic piece of work, an offender by conviction who only missed the opportunity to make his career with the Gestapo because he was born after the war.  He certainly would have had what it takes.”

Norway’s Trond Ali Linstadt, a convert to Islam, is listed at number 8.  Also lacking originality, he warns his readers to “beware of the Jews” and the “influence they have in newspapers, in other media, and in many political organs.”  Why is he important enough to make the list?  Until international pressure forced him to backtrack, the king of Norway, Harald V, had slated him to receive a medal for “good works.”  One must assume that the king agrees with Linstadt that suicide bombings are good and that God wants Jews to live in exile as punishment.

In seventh position, representing the right-wing Hungarian Jobbik Party, is Marton Gyongyosi.  This sweetheart of a guy, a flashback of historical Hungarian anti-Semitism, recently had this to say to the Hungarian Parliament:

I think now is the time to assess how many people there are of Jewish origin here, and especially in the Hungarian parliament who represent a certain national security risk of Hungary.

The son of a diplomat who grew up in the Middle East — namely, in Egypt, Iraq, and Afghanistan — his office is replete with souvenirs from these countries.

Number six is the founder of the Greek pro-fascist party Golden Dawn, Nikolaos Michaloliakos.  A Holocaust-denier of the first degree, he recently told an interviewer that six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust.  He further denies that there were gas chambers or ovens at Nazi death camps and has a penchant for giving the Nazi salute, which he recently gave at the Athens City Council.

What list of anti-Semites could ever be complete without a delegation from that bastion of historical Jew-hatred, the Ukraine?  As such, two people — Oleg Tyagnibok, from the fascist Svoboda Party, and MP Igor Miroshnichenko — share the inglorious fifth position.

Tyagnibok has called in the past for purges of the approximately 400,000 Jews living in the Ukraine.  Granted, with the despicable and sordid treatment Jews have received over the centuries in the Ukraine, one can’t help but wonder why 400,000 are still living there.

His cohort, politician Igor Miroshnichenko, sparked an outrage this past year when he denounced Hollywood actress Mila Kunis as a dirty Jewess.

The Wiesenthal Center reserved the fourth spot for fans of European soccer.  Before a match in Italy between an Italian club, Lazio, and a mainly Jewish team from England, Tottenham Hotspur, Jewish players and fans were physically attacked, one being sent to the hospital with severe stab wounds.  A self-proclaimed fascist from the Lazio team, Pablo Di Canio, celebrated each goal by tauntingly delivering a fascist salute.  So much for good sportsmanship.

(((CLICK BELOW TO HEAR AUDIO)))

Yishai is joined by Dr. Efraim Zuroff, who is the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem and one of the last Nazi hunters, those dedicated to bringing Holocaust perpetrators to justice. Yishai and Zuroff talk about Zuroff’s background and how he found himself becoming involved in bringing aging Nazi war criminals to justice. They also talk about Zuroff’s book “Operation Last Chance” and also the ongoing investigation that uses the same name, specifically talking about Nazi war criminals that have been captured and tried in recent years.

Yishai Fleisher on Twitter: @YishaiFleisher
Yishai on Facebook

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

If there were an Olympics for lying, the winner of this year’s gold medal for prevarication would be Egypt’s president, Mohammed Morsi.

Of course heads of state lie, but rarely do they display it with such chutzpah. The recent sleight-of-hand involving a president-to-president exchange would shock even cynics.

The letter in question was an apparent peace offering to Israeli president Shimon Peres, written by Morsi, the newly elected president of Egypt. Understanding its importance, Peres’s office released Morsi’s letter expressing best wishes to “the Israeli people” while thanking Peres for his missive congratulating Morsi on his election.

No sooner had the media run with the story than word came from Cairo that — you guessed it — Morsi denies he ever sent the letter.

Who you gonna believe: Morsi or Morsi?

This is not a case like the forged “Hitler Diaries.” No need for a graphologist to determine whether the henpecks are really Morsi’s.

The truth is as obvious as the nose on the face of the Sphinx, shot off by a medieval zealot who undoubtedly would have joined the Muslim Brotherhood had it existed back then.

Even the “blind sheikh,” Omar Abdul Rahman — serving a life sentence for masterminding the murderous 1993 attack on the World Trade Center — whom Morsi is asking President Obama to pardon, could tell you that Morsi is actually practicing tequila – the approved art of lying to confuse infidels.

We all hope the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leader occupies the top civilian post in the Arab world’s largest nation, will change its stripes now that it has power. But the world needs to verify before trusting. Here’s a reminder of the Brotherhood’s horrific track record:

* Assassinated Anwar Sadat for the sin of making peace with Israel.

* For half a century denounced the very concept of democracy as a heretical western import before a miraculous last-minute conversion in time to run Morsi for president.

* In the recent presidential campaign supporters intimidated many Christian Copts — ten percent of Egypt population — from voting against their man.

* Refuses to disavow Sharia law, imposing death sentences for homosexuals, adulterers, and Muslims who convert to another religion.

* Believes women are unfit to run for president.

* Has threatened to tear up Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel as soon as politically possible.

* Has urged its American followers to prepare for “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

During last year’s parliamentary campaign, the Brotherhood convened at Cairo’s most prominent mosque a genocidal hate fest orchestrated by senior activists vowing, “one day kill all Jews” and “Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Judgment Day is coming!”

That did not stop Washington from extending informal feelers to the Brotherhood that made predictions of a Brotherhood election victory almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And there was this Alice in Wonderland-like musing by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper before a Congressional committee: “The term Muslim Brotherhood is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”

Of course, even during the coldest years of the Cold War we negotiated with the Soviet Union — and in 2012 it is necessary that the U.S. conduct diplomatic relations with Egypt’s Islamist government, beneficiary of billions of dollars in ongoing American aid to the Egyptian people.

But while negotiating with Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Company, we never pretended that communism was “democracy, Russian-style” or that the KGB was as benign as the Boy Scouts. We mustn’t deceive ourselves about the Muslim Brotherhood.

This criticism is not directed exclusively at the present administration; the prior Bush administration “engaged” the Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorist spawn, Hamas, before it swept the 2006 Palestinian elections, staged a Gaza coup, and began firing thousands of missiles into Israel.

More crucial than deciphering Morsi’s handwriting, Washington should be setting clear parameters and red lines for America’s relationship with Egypt’s new president. The fate of the entire Middle East could be hanging in the balance.