Bobby Fischer dead at 64

[greggh]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/obitu ... yt&emc=rss

Probably the best Chess player ever. But the guy had gotten pretty nutso towards the end...

In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews he gave to a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely about an international Jewish conspiracy, which he said was bent on destroying him personally and the world generally.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were ”wonderful news,” adding he was wishing for a scenario “where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and secure hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”

...and his mother was Jewish

Edit: I found a video on Youtube of Bobby Fischer actually saying the quote attributed to him above...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 4365506699

The rant starts at 1:44. What he actually says is...

“...where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders...”

Misquoting that one word "execute" as "secure" drastically reduces the vileness of the statement.

[Brian]

Yeah, "nutso" is right. A definite warning sign was the Howard Hughes look. However, I don't think Hughes was anti-Semite; he was just another branch of "nusto."

[davijordan]

What a shame.... Chess has been the one sport (if you can call it that) that always has been multi national and multicultural. As a former member (but not a good chess player), at the Houston open chess tournaments I played at all people cared about was your skills and not really anything else. Bobby could have used his power to really take advantage of that to help make better peace in the world. He should have grown up in our neighborhood, gentiles were the minority and guess who was the majority.