Paolo Cocco/AFP - Getty Images, file

Paolo Di Canio gives a straight-arm salute to toward Lazio soccer fans after a game against Roma in Italy in January 2005.

The Anti-Defamation League has called for American businessman Ellis Short to fire the newly appointed head coach of his English soccer team amid claims he is a fascist.

Paulo Di Canio was put in charge of Premier League team Sunderland AFC this week despite previously praising Italy’s World War II dictator Benito Mussolini, reportedly declaring himself a “fascist” and giving straight-arm salutes to fans in his home country Italy.

The former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband resigned on Sunday as vice president of the club “in the light of the new manager’s past political statements.”

Amid growing uproar, Di Canio has previously declined to answer questions about his political views, but Sunderland issued a brief statement Wednesday in which Di Canio denied being a fascist or a racist.

"I feel that I should not have to continually justify myself to people who do not understand this, however I will say one thing only -- I am not the man that some people like to portray," he said. "I am not political, I do not affiliate myself to any organization, I am not a racist and I do not support the ideology of fascism. I respect everyone."

Nigel Roddis/Reuters

Di Canio poses for photographs after taking over as Sunderland's new coach on Tuesday.

However, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, dismissed the statement and said Wednesday that Di Canio should be fired, comparing him to sacked Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice.

"I would say sports is a very special category. Sports plays a very important role with young people," he said. "I would say racism or bigotry reverberates in a greater way, so the standard needs to be much higher than, I would say, the manager of a garage."

"Our society uses athletes and sports figures not only to sell Wheaties and sneakers, but also because they are looked up to as role models," he said. "Here [with Di Canio], I think firing is appropriate."

'His job is at stake'
Foxman said he believed people could have "an epiphany" about past mistakes and be given a second chance if they had genuinely changed.

"This is not one of those. He [Di Canio] is very clear what he is. He's both a fascist and a racist and he's proud of it," he said.

"For the moment, he denies it [being a fascist and a racist] because his job is at stake," he added.

A spokesman for Sunderland AFC said the club and Short would not be making any further comment when told of Foxman's call for Di Canio to be fired. Short said Monday that Di Canio was "passionate, driven and raring to get started."

Short made his fortune in the financial industry, previously working for companies including Lone Star Funds, an international, Dallas-based private equity firm.

In 2005, Italian news agency ANSA reported Di Canio had said he was “a fascist, not a racist.” In a statement issued by Sunderland on Monday, Di Canio appeared to suggest his remarks had been taken out of context.

Di Canio was fined twice in 2005 by soccer authorities for giving the straight-arm fascist salute, ANSA said.

The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper also noted that in his autobiography Di Canio wrote that Mussolini’s actions “were often vile. But all this was motivated by a higher purpose. He was basically a very principled individual."

In May 2012, Di Canio, then in charge of Swindon Town soccer club, dismissed a complaint of racism made by a black player at the club, Jonathan Tehoue, as a "non-story," BBC News reported. Swindon Town, however, said in a letter to Tehoue's lawyers that it "does not condone" what it described as "inappropriate" remarks made to the player by Di Canio and apologized.

Di Canio's appointment to the Sunderland job prompted a leading clergyman, the Very Rev. Michael Sadgrove, the Dean of Durham, to write an emotional open letter to him.

Sadgrove, writing before Wednesday’s statement was issued by the club, said he was a Sunderland fan and "the child of a Jewish war refugee who got out of Germany and came to Britain just in time."

"Some of her family and friends perished in the Nazi death camps. So I find your self-confessed fascism deeply troubling,” he said.

“Fascism was nearly the undoing of the world. It cost millions of innocent lives. Mussolini, who you say has been deeply misunderstood, openly colluded with it,” he said.

“You say that you are not a racist, but it needs great sophistication to understand how fascism and racism are ultimately different,” he added.

Sadgrove said that “unless you clearly renounce fascism in all its manifestations, you will be associated with these toxic far-right tendencies we have seen too much of in this region.”

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Praxilla Trabattoni / NBC News

California native Nicholas Burnett, 20, stabbed in a pub in Rome where he was on his semester abroad studying at Temple University.

ROME — An American college student suffered a foot-long stab wound and a punctured lung when a mob of up to 50 masked men armed with knives and baseball bats suddenly charged English soccer fans and others in a piazza in Italian capital Rome, he told NBC News.

Local media initially blamed Thursday's attack on hard core fans or "Ultras" supporting soccer team Lazio — who played English team Tottenham on Thursday — but two fans of bitter rivals Roma were among a group of 15 detained for alleged involvement in attack, suggesting a different motive.

Witnesses told local media that the attackers shouted "Jews, Jews" as they laid siege to the bar in a district popular with tourists in an old quarter of Rome, raising fears of far-right, racist violence, Reuters reported.

Ten people were injured in the attack and 25-year old Ashley Mills, reportedly an English Tottenham supporter, was left in critical condition. Mills was still hospitalized on Friday, the wire service said.

Tried to run
Nicholas Burnett, 20, of Anaheim, Calif., told NBC News he was standing outside the bar with some friends when he saw "40 to 50 storm into the piazza."

At first, he said they looked "just like a bunch of guys wearing costumes," but the seriousness of the situation quickly became clear.

"Some were wearing helmets, others had scarves covering their faces and all of them were carrying weapons, of all sorts. Sticks, bats, wooden planks, some were swinging their thick belts with heavy buckles," Burnett said.

"All of a sudden they started charging towards the bar. I tried to run away from them and one of the guys broke away from the crowd and took a swing at me over the head with what I though was a baseball bat," he said.

"But judging by my wound it was not a baseball bat, but more like a knife. I ran as fast as I could away from them. ... A couple of minutes later, I realized I was bleeding when I touched my back and felt the T-shirt all wet," he added.

Yara Nardi / Reuters

A pub is seen damaged after a fight in downtown Rome on Thursday.

As he fled, he met two students from John Cabot University, who tried to hail a taxi to take him to hospital, but the first driver "refused to take me in his car because I was all bloodied and still bleeding profusely," Burnett said.

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Burnett, who is on a semester abroad at Temple University in Rome, where he is studying business and Italian, was stabbed in the upper-right side of his back down to his left side, he told NBC. The stabbing punctured his right lung, he said.

"I had so many stitches that when I asked the doctors how many they were, they weren't even able to tell me. They simply said, 'Too many,'" he said.

'Very, very scared'
Burnett said he was initially unable to speak to the police because of the pain, but said he had been getting "great care" from medical staff.

"I would like to tell my friends and family back at home that I am OK," he said. "Although I was very, very scared."

Burnett said the attackers moved in unison like "clockwork."

"I don't know how they organized it so well, but that's what made it so scary ... to see them all coming at once threateningly waving what appeared to be makeshift weapons," he said.

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He said the attackers were "hurling anything they could find ... including chairs, tables, stools, bottles, shards from the broken windowpanes, bottles, glasses," he said.

Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno has expressed deep concern about the attack and said he hoped the police would quickly track down those responsible.

"We were all just having a drink, we weren't there for the football (soccer). I don't care for football at all and I don’t know anything about it," Burnett said.

NBC News' Ian Johnston and Reuters contributed to this report.

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A statue of the comic strip character Tintin by Brussels-born author Georges Remi, better known as Herge, is displayed at the workshop of Congolese artist Auguy Kakese in Kinshasa on Sept. 18.

KINSHASA, Congo — Any Tintin fan would feel at home in this small wooden shed in a back street of Democratic Republic of Congo's capital Kinshasa, where the shelves are crammed with brightly painted statues from the famous Belgian cartoon character's adventures.

Friendly faces are everywhere — the tufted-haired Tintin, the bearded Captain Haddock and the bumbling policemen Thomson & Thompson — all lovingly carved from wood and carefully painted in bold colors.

But with Kinshasa preparing to receive a flood of visitors for an international summit of French-speaking countries next month, some are questioning whether Congo should turn its back on the boy journalist, whose fictional adventures in the then-Belgian colony depicts Africans as dull-witted and childish.

Tintin's relationship with Congo dates back to 1930 when his creator Georges Remi — better-known by his pen name Herge — first wrote "Tintin in the Congo," in which the intrepid reporter and his little white dog Snowy tackle wild animals, hunters, diamond smugglers and warlike local chieftains.

Tintin statues, which can sell for anything from $15 to $1500, are part of Congo's roaring trade in the comic's memorabilia, business that could receive a boost next month as delegates from 56 countries across the French-speaking world gather in Kinshasa for a summit.

Brutal colonial past
Tourists can find stalls and street vendors across the riverside capital selling the figures, and can even buy personalized paintings of the book's front cover, with their names expertly added by the artist.

But it is Herge's heavily stereotyped depiction of Africans as fat-lipped, childlike savages that makes Tintin a controversial cultural figure for a country trying to turn its back on a brutal colonial past followed by decades of dictatorship and conflict, according to professor Joseph Ibongo Gilungule, the director of Congo's national museum.

Jonny Hogg/Reuters

Shelves crammed with figurines from Belgian comic strips Tintin and Le Chat are displayed at the workshop of Congolese artist Auguy Kakese in Kinshasa on Sept. 18.

"Tintin is an image created by Westerners, and it proves the ignorance of these people, a lack of understanding for our values," Ibongo told Reuters.

Ibongo wants more people to celebrate the rich cultures of the country's estimated 250 ethnic groups.

His museum is a celebration of the masks, headdresses and clothing that have played an integral part in Congo's traditional values, but few of the country's 70 million inhabitants come to visit the museum.

Ibongo is not against preserving relics of Congo's colonial past. He is trying to find money to rehabilitate the statue of controversial British colonial explorer Henry Morton Stanley, which lies forlornly toppled behind a shed at the museum.

Nonetheless, with so many people due to visit the country for the International Organisation of La Francophonie summit in October, he believes Congo should find a better poster boy than Tintin.

"There are other strong images which speak positively of this country, its peoples ... It would be more respectful to Congo and the whole of Africa if we spoke of images that value the Congo, and not Tintin," Ibongo added.

Tintin has world premiere in Belgian hometown

Earlier this year a Congolese man studying in Belgium tried and failed to have the book banned on the grounds of racism. Some stores in Britain have banished it to the top shelves, where only adults can see it.

Even Tintin's creator Herge later re-wrote parts of the story, toning down the more extreme stereotypes which sprang from Belgium's colonization of Congo, which was brutal even by the standards of the day.

'It's humor'
Auguy Kakese, an artisan who specializes in Tintin statuettes, acknowledges that it was Europeans who first suggested he carve the figures and most of his clients remain westerners. But he sees no harm in it.

"It's humor, it's not racist... for those who say it's racist I say that in the comic strip, you never see images which show him trying to kill the Congolese," Kakese said in his workshop, which employs 10 people and produces thousands of Tintin statues.

Although most of the statues Kakese sells are of the comic's European characters, he does not shy away from depicting the Africans as well, despite them seeming uncomfortably stereotyped for modern tastes.

"We were a Belgian colony, if we work with Tintin now it's to say that the Belgians are still our brothers," he added.

5 things you need to know about Tintin

A recent showing in Kinshasa of the Steven Spielberg-directed Tintin movie attracted a small but varied audience, everyone from Congolese to Koreans.

Although the audience were aware of the cartoon's sometimes complex relations with Congo, none saw it as a huge problem.

"I really don't think it is racist, it was just the whites wanting to interpret what they saw in Congo at the time," Congolese Tito Biteketa said.

Christiana Finotti, an Italian expatriate, said she had bought a Tintin picture for her friend but acknowledged that not all her Congolese colleagues were comfortable with the association.

"Tintin in the Congo is still a little difficult, due to the style of Belgian colonialism, and due to the history... I think there's been a reconciliation, but the reconciliation hasn't been easy," she said.

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