Chess legend Bobby Fischer – the reclusive grandmaster known for his oddball behavior – has come out of hiding to claim he’s being persecuted by “the Jews,” it was reported yesterday.
In a rambling, anti-semitic interview in Hungary, where he now lives, Brooklyn-born Fischer told a Budapest radio station that the Holocaust was a sham and that “the Jews” are part of a global conspiracy, the Sunday Times of London and the London Daily Telegraph reported.
“What is going on is that I am being persecuted night and day by the Jews,” the half-Jewish Fischer reportedly said – just moments after he was asked about his travels around Europe over the past few years.
Fischer, 55, also reportedly claimed he had put some of his possessions into storage in Pasadena, Calif. – but that they were taken by the Jewish-backed company for nonpayment.
The “goddamned Jews in America have just gone and grabbed it all,” Fischer ranted, the newspapers said.
When the interviewer pointed out Fischer’s Jewish roots, the one-time child genius yelled, “If you want to go the little boys’ room, we can see who is the Jew.”
It was unclear when the interview – Fischer’s first since 1992 – took place.
Fischer reportedly has refused to talk to journalists unless they cough up about $800,000 – but he approached Budapest’s Radio Calypso and offered to go on the air for free.
It wasn’t the first time that Fischer – who’s been on the lam from U.S. authorities for six years – has come out swinging against Jews.
In December 1992, Fischer railed about a Jewish plot to destroy him after he was indicted in the United States on charges that he broke international sanctions against Yugoslavia by playing there in a $3 million match against Russian champ Boris Spassky.
“I consider that high Jewry is behind it and they are out to get me,” Fischer said at the time.
At a press conference a few months earlier, Fischer spat on a letter from the U.S. Treasury Department telling him he would be violating the sanctions if he played the match – and proudly told reporters he hadn’t paid income taxes in 15 years.
In 1972, he became the world champ in his first match against Spassky – but was stripped of the title three years later, when he reused to defend it against a new challenger.
He went into seclusion for the next 20 years, emerging for the rematch with Spassky.