Northwestern prof denies Holocaust

chicago (jta) | The president of Northwestern University blasted one of the school’s professors for denying the Holocaust.

The president, Henry Bienen, said this week that Arthur Butz’s comments are a “contemptible insult to all decent and feeling people.”

Butz, an engineering professor, emailed comments denying the Holocaust to an Iranian news agency. In comments that were also posted on his Web site, Butz called the Holocaust a “deliberately contrived falsehood.”

washington (jta) | An economics magazine will be shut down after running an anti-Semitic article.

The promise to shut down Global Agenda was made in a Feb. 3 letter from the head of the World Economic Forum, Professor Klaus Schwab, to the head of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris.

Schwab said the article, which called for an international boycott of Israel, was “inflammatory and venomous.” It will be replaced in the reprinted Global Agenda with an editorial by Schwab about the values of the forum.

washington (ap) | Television evangelist Pat Robertson, who has rattled the religious and political establishment with recent controversial declarations, acknowledged last week that “my passion runs ahead of me.”

“I’ve been doing TV for years and years,” Robertson said. “And the problem is I ad lib.”

Robertson was questioned on ABC’s “Good Morning America” about suggesting that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke was God’s punishment for giving up the Gaza Strip.

He sent a letter to Sharon’s family apologizing for his remark about the Israeli leader.

boca raton, fla. (ynetnews) | An Israeli real estate tycoon recently purchased three residential neighborhoods in Florida for $91 million.

Through his privately owned Elad realty firm, Yitzhak Tshuva bought the three Boca Raton neighborhoods, which contain 476 housing units.

Elad plans to convert the housing units, which up until recently were rented out to families, into apartments for sale.