Jewish & World News

A French Jewish group that sued Twitter for hosting anti-Semitic content lodged a fresh complaint against the social networking service. The latest complaint by the Union of Jewish Students of France, or UEJF, was filed on April 12 with the Paris Public Prosecutor’s office against Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. UEJF and another group, J’ACCUSE, said in the complaint that Costolo was “responsible for racial defamation and publicly inciting to discrimination, hate or violence toward Jews.”

A fake explosive device was found near a Jewish institution in the French city of Lyon. Police were called to examine the object Tuesday morning after a store owner reported that, while walking past Lyon’s Hillel Center, he found a contraption made of three metal cylinders connected with metal wires to what looked like a cellular phone, according to a report on the incident by the SPCJ security unit of France’s Jewish communities.

Mohammed Merah's mother said in a first interview with French media that she did not understand what made her son kill three French soldiers and four Jews in Toulouse last year. “I don’t understand any of it, he was a good and kind kid,” Zoulikha Aziri said in an interview broadcast Wednesday on France 3 TV. “Then he changed all at once, I don’t know why. He’s dead and took many people with him.” She said her son “never mentioned jihad.” Aziri also denied reports by other relatives that “there was talk of jihad” in the family.

France saw an increase of 58 percent in anti-Semitic incidents in 2012 compared to the previous year, according to a report by the French Jewish community. The report released on Tuesday by the SPCJ, the security unit of France’s Jewish communities, showed that 614 anti-Semitic acts were documented in the republic last year compared to only 389 in 2011.

France launched a search for the Jewish owners of about 2,000 pieces of Nazi-plundered art, from Monets and Rubens to Renoirs, that hang in museums such as the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Almost 70 years after World War II, France is making one of its biggest efforts to trace the Jewish owners of artworks stolen by the Nazis, recovered by the Allies and sent to the country after the war. President Francois Hollande’s government is setting up a group of historians, regulators, archivists and curators to actively track down families, instead of waiting for claimants to come forward. The group starts working in March.

French police arrested two men in connection with recent anti-Semitic attacks near Marseille. One of the suspects in the attacks in Aix en Provence, a Tunisian national without a visa, was placed in a detention center, according to a Feb. 14 statement by SPCJ, the security affiliate of France’s Jewish communities, SPCJ.

A 20-year-old Jewish man wearing a Star of David pendant was mugged and robbed twice outside Marseille’s main train station.  Two men on a scooter approached the victim on Monday outside Saint-Charles, a busy train station and shopping mall, and one tore the golden chain from his neck, the La Provence daily reported. They called him a “dirty Jew” before fleeing on the scooter, with one of the alleged assailants carrying the pendant.

A woman has been arrested for brandishing a knife at a student outside the same Toulouse Jewish school which was the scene of last year's terrorist murders. Allegedly shouting antisemitic slogans and appearing “mentally unstable”, the 51-year-old woman waved the knife at the boy as he left the Ohr HaTorah school yesterday.

Some 100 imams will commemorate the Holocaust at a memorial monument near Paris. Monday's event is planned for Drancy, a suburb of the French capital where tens of thousands of Jews were confined in 1942 before being transported to extermination camps during the German Nazi occupation, according to a report in the French daily Le Figaro. The paper called the event unprecedented.

French police arrested two people on Tuesday in the hunt for accomplices of an al Qaida-inspired gunman who went on a killing spree in March, a judicial source said. The two men aged 29 and 30 were detained in southwest France, where gunman Mohamed Merah killed three soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish children before he was shot dead by elite police forces besieging his home.

France's Le Monde newspaper says it has seen confidential documents of the police investigation into Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah that suggest he was not working alone.

French police are investigating the death of a Jewish mother who fought to get her daughter back from a Saudi prince, amid speculation by some media over the circumstances. Candice Cohen Ahnine, 35, fell from her fourth-floor Paris balcony last week.

French security services had watched Toulouse shooter Mohamed Merah since the end of 2009 and judged his behavior "worrying" in late 2011, according to declassified documents. As part of a probe into his killings, France's DCRI domestic intelligence agency has released documents relating to the al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist who killed seven people in March.

Prime Minister David Cameron said on Thursday that Britain's Olympic cycling glory has driven France "mad", and rejected claims of cheating by pointing out that the riders' wheels are made across the Channel. "We've got a system that seems to be delivering. It's driving the French mad," Cameron told BBC radio in an interview.

French Jewish leaders are calling the tossing of two pig heads into a mosque not far from Toulouse “an odious desecration.” Worshippers at the Salam mosque in Montauban in southern France discovered two pig heads at the entrance to the building yesterday.

French television channel TF1 aired Sunday for the first time an audio discussion between Toulouse killer Mohamed Merah and the police during the 32-hour siege on his apartment. Merah was shot in the head in a gunfight at the end of the standoff. In the recordings, Merah claims to be ready to continue his killing spree, saying he had links to al-Qaeda and organized crime groups. Merah also told the police how he managed to escape the intelligence services.

Mohammed Merah's father claimed that he would sue the French state over his son's death. "France is a big country that had the means to take my son alive. They could have knocked him out with gas and taken him in," said Mohamed Benalel Merah.

The family of Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah is divided about whether to have him buried him France or in Algeria, media reports said Monday. Le Parisien daily quoted a member of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) as saying that one of Merah's brothers claimed he had expressed a desire to be buried in France but that his mother wanted him to be interred in Algeria.

Video footage filmed by Mohamed Merah, who killed seven people in south-west France, has been received by al-Jazeera in Paris, police sources say. A computer memory stick containing a montage of clips along with readings from the Koran was sent to the TV channel before being passed to police. Merah, 23, was killed in a shoot-out with police last week.

France will bar radical Muslim preachers from entering the country to participate in an Islamic conference next month as part of a crackdown after shootings by an al Qaida-inspired gunman, President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Monday. Sarkozy, who has announced plans to punish those viewing Islamist Web sites and going abroad for indoctrination, said he would block the entry of some imams invited to a congress organized by the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF). The UOIF, one of three Muslim federations in France, is regarded as close to Egypt's Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. "I have clearly indicated that there certain people who have been invited to this congress who are not welcome on French soil," Sarkozy told France Info radio.