Zagreb police last week pressed charges against Ivan Kesic, a 21-year-old student, for sending a threatening e-mail to the Zagreb Jewish Municipality, which received another one today, this time a much longer message whose anonymous author insulted the victims of the Holocaust, Jews and the black race.
Police are establishing the author's identity as well as the identities of two young men wearing T-shirts with Nazi insignia who first verbally and then physically assaulted Aloni in downtown Zagreb on Saturday, police spokeswoman Aleksandra Ljuba said, adding Aloni reported the incident yesterday.
Aloni told the media that in Germany, whence he came from, those youths would have ended up in jail for wearing T-shirts with swastikas alone.
In today's statement, the Zagreb Jewish Municipality said the incident pointed to the vagueness of Croatian laws because "not every evocation of the fascist ideology and its symbols is subject to criminal prosecution".
Unlike Germany, the country with the most drastic consequences of that ideology, which has been speaking for decades to the new generations with literature, films and TV programmes, dealing with its past in a very resolute and good manner, we bashfully try to leave it to oblivion, so it comes back and laughs in our faces, said the statement.
Simon Wiesenthal Centre investigator Alen Budaj too commented on the assault on Rabbi Aloni and the threatening messages, saying the Centre had noted an increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Croatia.