Bulgarian Jewish organisation ‘Shalom’ lodges complaint over ‘analysis’ article on website
The Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria “Shalom” has lodged a written complaint with the country’s National Coordinator against Antisemitism over an article on the Bulgarian-language Trud website titled “The political oligarchs are heading for a fall”.
The item, posted on December 10 and by the evening of December 11 showing as the most-read on the website, has the sub-heading: “The Rothschilds and Levites are making every effort to push united Europe on the road of Napoleon and Hitler”.
The author is named as Dr Iliya Iliev, a frequent contributor to the website, identified elsewhere as a expert in political psychology, and whose appearances in various Bulgarian-language media have included regular participation in talk shows on the television channel Skat, owned by ultra-nationalist politician Valeri Simeonov.
Condemning the article, Shalom said: “Once again we see how a national daily serves as a platform for disseminating theories about the world Jewish conspiracy, and encourages commentators to use hate speech and attacks on individual groups based on their faith, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation and other denotations”.
In a letter to Deputy Foreign Minister Georg Georgiev, Bulgaria’s National Coordinator for Combating Antisemitism, the organisation’s president, Associate Professor Alexander Oscar, said that it was absolutely unacceptable for a media claiming any objectivity and credibility to disseminate texts by Iliev “who sees big Jewish capital involved in every turning point in national, European or world history”.
The letter said that in February, Iliev had authored an item headlined “The demon of the Russian revolution is Trotsky”.
It said that so far, every attempt to contact Petyo Bluskov, editor-in-chief of Trud, had failed.
Addressing Georgiev, the organisation said that it believed that he would take every step necessary to address the matter with all the rigour of existing legislation “and to give impetus to the adoption of the planned legislative changes that would limit such events in the future”.
