Austria’s neo-Nazis find friends in Israel

Is there any Far-Right or Anti-Semitic Regime or Party that Israel is not friends with?

neo-Nazi Heinz Christian Strache pays a vist to Israel's holocaust propaganda museum Yad Vashem

In this article on Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah details the friendly relations between the Austrian state and Israel.  Austria has just elected a new Right-wing parliament with the Austrian Peoples Party the gaining the largest number of seats, 62, with the far-Right Freedom Party third with 51 seats, just behind the social democrats with 52 seats.  It is possible that Herr Strache’s Freedom Party will  become part of the governing coalition.

Strache was invited earlier in the year as a guest of the Likud party in Israel.  It is a party which is vehemently anti-Muslim but also ardently pro-Zionist.  It is hard to think of a serious far-Right party in Europe, apart from the Greek Golden Dawn and the Hungarian Jobbik who aren’t pro-Zionist.

Tony Greenstein

Ali Abunimah Power Suits 16 October 2017

Austria’s ambassador in Tel Aviv sees nothing wrong with Arab parties being excluded from Israel’s government.

As his own country looks set to put neo-Nazis in power in Vienna, this is yet another remarkable demonstration of the racist values shared by European and Israeli elites.

Just as in Germany, there are clear indications of ties between Austria’s neo-Nazi far right and Israel’s right wing.

Israel's new friends - the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO)

Ambassador backs exclusion

Last week Avi Gabbay, the leader of Israel’s ostensibly dovish Labor Party, declared that he would not join a coalition along with members of the Joint List, a grouping of parties made up predominantly of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“We will not share a government with the Joint List, period,” Gabbay said. “Let that be clear.”

Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, condemned Gabbay’s racism. “Someone who doesn’t view Arab citizens and their elected representatives as a legitimate group, doesn’t present a real alternative to the right,” Odeh said.

At the same time, Gabbay indicated he could team up with Yisrael Beiteinu, the far-right party led by Israel’s notoriously anti-Arab defense minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Lieberman believes Palestinians like Odeh should eventually be stripped of their Israeli citizenship altogether.

Gabbay’s racism is unremarkable in the Israeli context. It has long been a consensus among Zionist parties that the fifth of the country’s citizens who are Palestinians should have no real role in decision-making.

Austria's neo-Nazi Freedom Party - a solid supporter of Israel

Gabbay followed up with more belligerent comments on Sunday, declaring that “the Arabs have to be afraid of us” and that Israel need never evacuate any of its settlements built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law.

But what has also sadly become unsurprising is to see European diplomats, who frequently pretend to represent an enlightened “human rights” perspective, rationalizing this racism.

On Friday, Martin Weiss, the Austrian ambassador in Tel Aviv had lunch with Gabbay, and appeared to offer a warm endorsement of the Israeli Labor leader on Twitter:

Weiss and Gabbay were joined for lunch by several other European diplomats.

I asked on Twitter if the Europeans had raised the issue of Gabbay’s open anti-Arab racism during the lunch.

Weiss responded, pointing out fairly enough that the lunch had taken place the day before Gabbay’s remarks refusing to let Arab parties join a coalition were reported.

Weiss added, “But do you think members of the Joint List would really want to join a Labor government?”

The Austrian ambassador appeared to be deflecting attention from Gabbay’s racism by pointing out that citizens who are discriminated against might not want inclusion in the first place.

I wanted to give Weiss an opportunity to back away from this, so I challenged him to publicly condemn Gabbay’s racism.

“Thanks but no thanks,” the ambassador replied. “Seems to me that every political party has the right to declare with which other party they would cooperate – or not.”

This could not be a clearer endorsement of the longstanding racist exclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel on the grounds of their ethnicity.

Heinz-Christian Strache, the neo-Nazi leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, left, with Yehuda Glick, a leader of the Jewish extremist movement that aims to replace Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque with a Jewish temple, in Vienna in June. (via Facebook)

Apartheid politics

It’s worth recalling that the landmark UN report on Israeli apartheid, suppressed last March by the UN secretary-general on American orders, found that while Israel’s political system gives nominal rights to the roughly 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, these add up to little in practice.

“Voting rights lose their significance in terms of equal rights when a racial group is legally banned from challenging laws that perpetuate inequality,” the report states. “Israeli law bans organized Palestinian opposition to Jewish domination, rendering it illegal and even seditious.”

These formal restrictions on advocating for an end to state-sponsored racism are supplemented by the informal consensus among party leaders – from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning that Arabs were voting “in droves” to Gabbay vowing not to include the Joint List in a coalition – that government is an exclusively Jewish matter.

Neo-Nazis embrace Israeli right

Ambassador Weiss’ defense of Israeli racism was perhaps a warm-up for the work he’ll have to do defending his own country’s government in coming months.

Following Sunday’s Austrian general election, a new right-wing government led by the youthful foreign minister Sebastian Kurz is set to take power.

It’s widely expected that Kurz’s conservative People’s Party will form a coalition with the far-right, anti-Muslim Freedom Party, headed by neo-Nazi Heinz-Christian Strache.

The Freedom Party’s success comes just weeks after the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany – known by its initials AfD – took about 100 seats in the Bundestag.

And just like AfD, Austria’s Freedom Party has discovered a recent affinity for Israel.

Last year, Strache, who used to march with a group imitating the Hitler Youth, visited Israel at the invitation of lawmakers from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party.

Just like other assorted anti-Semites and far-right extremists, Strache apparently saw Israel providing a laundering service. As media reports in Austria put it, the intention of Strache’s visit – complete with a pilgrimage to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial – was “to make himself kosher in Israel” in the hope that this would give him respectability elsewhere.

Europe’s new fascists and Israel’s right have also found an alliance in their common hatred of Muslims.

In June, Strache welcomed to Vienna Likud lawmaker Yehuda Glick, a leader in the so-called Temple Movement, which aims to destroy Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with a Jewish temple.

A photo posted on Strache’s Facebook page shows the pair in a friendly meeting.

European Jewish organizations have condemned Israeli outreach to Europe’s far right, including the Freedom Party. Last November, the leader of the Vienna Jewish community published a letter calling on Israeli politicians to shun such meetings and “to draw a very clear red line between us and those who represent hate, neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism.”

Recall that while Germany’s Jewish community expressed horror at AfD’s recent electoral success, Yehuda Glick defended the party.

There’s no mystery why: AfD leaders have given strong backing to Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Austria’s Strache is following a similar line, supporting the settlements and becoming a champion of Israel’s claims to Jerusalem that are rejected by the rest of the world.

Strache handed Glick a letter to be delivered to Netanyahu vowing to do all he could to push for Austria’s embassy in Tel Aviv to be moved to Jerusalem.

With his party set to join the government, Strache will have his chance.

Once again, Israel is showing that its closest allies in Europe are the worst enemies of Jewish people.

see also

Growing Far-Right Nationalistic Movements Are Dangerously Anti-Muslim — and Pro-Israel

The false 'anti-Semitism' allegations at Labour Conference have one purpose only - to destabilise Corbyn's leadership

One Lie Too Many - Warren Morgan, Brighton's Council leader should be expelled for falsely alleging that supporters of the Palestinians & FSOI are holocaust deniers

When it comes to lying, Cllr. Warren Morgan has form

The Zionists must be getting desperate when they have to resort to blatant lies about holocaust denial at a fringe Labour Party meeting held by Free Speech on Israel.

The fake news allegations, from Wes Streeting MP, Warren Morgan and the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement that Free Speech on Israel or myself believe that Holocaust denial is a topic worthy of discussion is a blatant lie.  At no time has anyone ever suggested this. 

Last Monday there was a packed fringe meeting of Free Speech on Israel at the Friends Meeting House in Brighton.  The room was so packed that people were listening in the garden.  All the speakers at the top table including the Chair Jenny Manson were Jewish.

Approximately half of those in the audience were Jewish.  All the speakers were Jewish. Nobody noticed anything about Holocaust denial because there was nothing. This whole story in the mass media about ‘anti-Semitism’ is a wholly contrived example of false flag news.  Complete Black Propaganda.

I spoke at the meeting and my main message was that we should not be defensive over the allegations of anti-Semitism.  On the contrary it is the far-Right, Breitbart News, Richard Spencer of the alt-Right and fascist parties led by people such as Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Herr Strache of Austria and of course our very own BNP and EDL who are avidly pro-Israel and pro-Zionist. 

Steve Bannon - Trumps anti-Semitic former advisor is ardently pro-Israel

The next guest at the Gala Dinner of the Zionist Organisation of America in November, is , Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategic advisor and a known anti-Semite.

Add caption

As Richard Spencer, founder of the alt-Right and a fully paid up neo-Nazi declared, he is a White Zionist.  Anti-Semites the world over admire Israel and only wish they could emulate it.  Israel is viciously anti-Muslim, overtly racist     and at the moment it is trying to remove citizenship from its own Palestinian citizens.  What is there not to like about Israel from the point of view of fascists and anti-Semites?

That is why the new far-Right party in the German Bundestag, Alternative for Germany, AfD is pro-Zionist.  They love Israel but hate Jews!  They want to rehabilitate the German army in the war, they want to 'revise' German history concerning the second world war but they are above all an anti-Muslim party.  That is why Zionism fits the bill.

When Benjamin Netanyahu’s own son, Yair, posted an anti-Semitic cartoon directed at George Soros, his biggest fans were David Duke, a holocaust denier and former KKK Grand Wizard and Andrew Anglin, editor of the Neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, named after the paper of Julius Strecher, Der Sturmer.  Streicher was executed in 1946 for crimes against humanity at Nuremburg.

There is no truth whatsoever in Warren Morgan's statement that

 'We have the prominent activist and suspended Labour Party member Tony Greenstein here, who indeed was present at the [Free Speech on Israel] fringe meeting where it was suggested that Holocaust denial should be allowed. His expulsion, in my view, is long overdue.' 

This is a good example of how Labour's false antisemitism allegations have been manufactured over the past two years.  No one at the Free Speech on Israel meeting last Monday even mentioned holocaust denial, let alone suggested that it should be discussed.  I would be completely opposed to such a discussion.  There is no  point in debating flat earthers.

I don't believe holocaust denial should be criminalised, as in Germany and Austria, because not only does that drive it underground but it gives the appearance of people wanting to suppress uncomfortable truths.  However, in Europe and America, there is no doubt that holocaust denial is nearly always a product of neo-Nazi historical revision.

There are some people who do believe that holocaust denial is protected speech.  They are not anti-Semites.  They include not only Noam Chomsky but the most renowned historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg, editor of The Destruction of the European Jews.  Hilberg believed that Holocaust historians could actually learn something from these people because they pointed out flaws in our own reasoning.

However no one at the FSOI meeting advocated talking with holocaust deniers.  In my 40+ years involvement in the Palestine solidarity movement I have known of no such discussion in PSC. 

In 2012 one person, Frances Clarke Lowes expressed Holocaust denial views in Palestine Solidarity Campaign.  I immediately proposed his expulsion both from the local group and nationally.  What Miko Peled said was:  '‘It’s about freedom to discuss and criticise every issue whether it’s the Holocaust yes or no whether its Palestine...’ He obviously was not disputing the holocaust.  What he was doing was advocating that we should have freedom of speech on every issue, including the Holocaust.  A very different thing.

Last year Warren Morgan alleged that there was spitting at the Labour Party AGM in Brighton.  It was totally untrue but it achieved its purpose, the suspension of Brighton & Hove Labour Party and the annulment of the elections.  Warren Morgan is someone who has no compunction in lying if it benefits Progress and his wing of the Labour Party.  The man is completely unfit to be Labour leader in Brighton and Hove.  He has no regard for the truth.  He is prepared to lie for political advantage no matter who he hurts or damages.  He has no moral scruples worthy of the name. Warren Morgan has to go as Brighton & Hove's Council leader.

Even if someone had mentioned Holocaust denial at the meeting in question, why does that make me guilty?  This is an excellent example of the McCarthyist technique of guilt-by-association.  Socialists and democrats fought hard against the techniques of Joe McCarthy, who was himself a Southern white supremacist and anti-Semite. 

I have been an active anti-racist and anti-fascist throughout my life.  I have been arrested and beaten up for opposing the fascists.  I co-founded Brighton & Hove Anti-fascist Committee and was Secretary of the Brighton and Hove Anti-Nazi League.

As the article I reproduce here from the Argus of October 16 1983 demonstrates I have myself been at the receiving end of this vile literature.

This is not about Holocaust denial but defending the Israeli State.  How else do you defend barbaric practices such as gaoling, shackling and torturing Palestinian children as young as 12 or the demolition of Palestinian villages such as al Hiran, in Israel's Negev, in order to build Jewish towns and settlements, other than by accusing Zionism’s opponents of anti-Semitism?  

Israel today is a racist and repressive state, which is attacking even Israeli human rights organisations such as Btselem and Breaking the Silence.  It is defunding critical and left wing theatre.  It is no accident that the reason why Netanyahu joined in with Hungary's racist Prime Minister Viktor Orban in attacking George Soros was because Soros has funded liberal Israeli NGOs.  

Israel is a state where right-wing mobs indulge in pogroms chanting ‘Mavet LaAravim’ (Death to the Arabs).  In Europe 80 years ago similar mobs chanted ‘Death to the Jews.’

People like Warren Morgan and the so-called Jewish Labour Movement want to divert attention from the fact that Israel is the most racist state in the world by distorting what we say.  It is a classic example of shooting the messenger rather than dealing with the message.

I have written to Morgan saying that if he doesn’t retract his insinuation that I am a sympathiser with or support Holocaust denial I will sue him for defamation.

Tony Greenstein

Please note this blog was corrected on 18th October to amend what Miko Peled said.  However my interpretation of what he said is exactly the same.