Martin Webster on European nationalist parties being friendly to Zionists/Jews
Subject: Marine Le Pen’s Front National “not racist ... definitely anti-Zionist”I am grateful to an independent British nationalist observer of Jewry who has forwarded to me three items (see below) written by “anti-racist” and, I judge, left wing Jews holding, respectively, British, American and Israeli nationalities and published in Jewish or pro-Jewish publications from 2010 to 2012.
They all deal with the issue of the effort which “right wing” / “racist” / “nationalist” parties in Europe have been making to ingratiate themselves with Jewry in the hope of gaining better media coverage, an enhanced (less “extremist”) voter-friendly image and perhaps financial backing.
These particular Jewish commentators and Jewish ‘defence’ organisations which they quote, such as Searchlight magazine and the Community Security Trust, all seem to think that this ‘love-bombing’ of the Jewish community is entirely cynical and opportunistic which, so far from being encouraged and rewarded, should be dismissed with scorn.
However, the three commentators seem to be ignorant of the way in which ‘right wing’ Zionist-Jews set out to cultivate and recruit European and American nationalists to the Zionist cause in recent years.
I myself was the target of just such an (unsuccessful!) overture by Rabbi Meier Schiller of New York about 25 years ago. I have already rehearsed that encounter in correspondence with you which you duly circulated to Shamireaders, so I will not repeat it here. I will only remark that this “opportunistic” cultivation has not been a one-way street in recent times, any more than it was before and during the Second World War.
We have seen a vivid example of the success of ‘right wing’ Zionist cultivation of European nationalist movements just recently with the mobilisation this February of sundry Ukrainian “neo-Nazi” groups to fight and kill fellow Ukrainians in order to facilitate the USA-backed Jewish Oligarchs’ coup against that country’s elected government.
The less violent but equally venal leaders of Austria’s, Holland’s and other western European nationalist parties have been traipsing to-and-fro to Israel, the USA and Canada (all expenses paid) to attend public and private meetings organised for them by Zionist ultras.
During the previous decade I chronicled how the BNP’s leader Nick Griffin made desperate efforts to try and suck on the same row of teats after encouragement from Jewish and gentile Zionists such as Barbara Amiel (a personal friend at Binyamin Netanyahu) and Michael Gove, a winner of the Zionist Federation’s Jerusalem Prize and now a member of H.M. Government.
The efforts by various European nationalist party leaders to cultivate the Jews may indeed be “opportunistic”, but the cultivation is mutual and is far from insincere.
If the European nationalists harbour at the back of their minds the notion that they will be able, somehow, to outwit the Jews, then they have another think coming. The Jews have been playing this game for centuries. They are best kept at arm’s length. No matter how long and how hard the road, the Enemy must be studied and fought, not cultivated and accommodated.
Sincerely,
Martin Webster.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/27/far-right-philozionism-racism
Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ - Tuesday 27th March 2012
Don’t be fooled.
Europe’s far-right racists are not discerning
Opportunistic words of love for Jews and Israel cannot
disguise the European far right’s toxic rhetoric of hatred
by Anne Karpf <http://www.theguardian.com/profile/annekarpf>
On Saturday, in the Danish city of Aarhus, a Europe-wide rally organised by the English Defence League <http://www.theguardian.com/uk/english-defence-league> will try to set up a European anti-Muslim movement. For Europe's far-right parties the rally, coming so soon after the murders in south-west France by a self-professed al-Qaida-following Muslim, marks a moment rich with potential political capital.
Yet it's also a delicate one, especially for Marine Le Pen. Well before the killings, Le Pen was assiduously courting Jews, even while her father and founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was last month convicted of contesting crimes against humanity <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/16/jean-marie-le-pen-convicted> for saying that the Nazi occupation of France "wasn't particularly inhumane". Marine must disassociate herself from such sentiments without repudiating her father personally or alienating his supporters. To do so she's laced her oft-expressed Islamophobia (parts of France, she's said, are suffering a kind of Muslim "occupation") with a newfound "philozionism" (love of Zionism), which has extended even to hobnobbing with Israel's UN ambassador.
Almost all European far-right parties have come up with the same toxic cocktail. The Dutch MP Geert Wilders, leader of the anti-immigrant Freedom party, has compared the Qur'an to Mein Kampf. In Tel Aviv in 2010, he declared that <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLcHeDSh5d4&feature=related> "Islam threatens not only Israel, Islam threatens the whole world. If Jerusalem falls today, Athens and Rome, Amsterdam and Paris will fall tomorrow."
Meanwhile Filip Dewinter, leader of Belgium's Vlaams Belang party, which grew out of the Vlaams Blok Flemish nationalist party, many of whose members collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war, has proposed a quota on the number of young Belgian-born Muslims allowed in public swimming pools. Dewinter calls Judaism "a pillar of European society", yet associates with antisemites, while claiming that <http://www.filipdewinter.be/%E2%80%9Cislamophobia-is-a-duty-for-everyone%E2%80%9D-gazet-van-antwerpen> "multi-culture ... like Aids weakens the resistance of the European body", and "Islamophobia is a duty".
But the most rabidly Islamophobic European philozionist is Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Austrian Freedom party, who compared foreigners to harmful insects and consorts with neo-Nazis. And yet where do we find Strache in December 2010? In Jerusalem alongside Dewinter, supporting Israel's right to defend itself.
In Scandinavia the anti-immigrant Danish People's party is a vocal supporter of Israel. And Siv Jensen, leader of the Norwegian Progress party and staunch supporter of Israel <http://www.theguardian.com/world/israel> , has warned of the stealthy Islamicisation of Norway.
In Britain EDL leader Tommy Robinson, in his first public speech, sported a star of David. At anti-immigrant rallies, EDL banners read: "There is no place for Fascist Islamic Jew Haters in England".
So has the Jew, that fabled rootless cosmopolitan, now suddenly become the embodiment of European culture, the "us" against which the Muslim can be cast as "them"? It's not so simple. For a start, "traditional" antisemitism hasn't exactly evaporated. Look at Hungary, whose ultra-nationalist Jobbik party is unapologetically Holocaust-denying, or Lithuania, where revisionist MPs claim that the Jews were as responsible as the Nazis for the second world war.
What's more, the "philosemite", who professes to love Jews and attributes superior intelligence and culture to them, is often (though not always) another incarnation of the antisemite, who projects negative qualities on to them: both see "the Jew" as a unified racial category. Beneath the admiring surface, philozionism isn't really an appreciation of Jewish culture but rather the opportunistic endorsement of Israeli nationalism and power.
Indeed you can blithely sign up to both antisemitism and philozionism. Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik described himself as "pro-Zionist" while claiming that Europe <http://www.theguardian.com/world/europe-news> has a "considerable Jewish problem"; he saw himself as simultaneously anti-Nazi and pro-monoculturalism. The British National party's Nick Griffin once called the Holocaust the "Holohoax", subsequently supported Israel in its war "against the terrorists", but the day after the Oslo murders tweeted disparagingly that Breivik was a "Zionist".
Most Jews, apart from the Israeli right wing, aren't fooled. They see the whole iconography of Nazism – vermin and foreign bodies, infectious diseases and alien values – pressed into service once again, but this time directed at Muslims. They understand that "my enemy's enemy" can easily mutate into "with friends like these ...".
The philozionism of European nationalist parties has been scrutinised most closely by Adar Primor, the foreign editor of Haaretz newspaper, who insists that <http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/the-unholy-alliance-between-israel-s-right-and-europe-s-anti-semites-1.330132> "they have not genuinely cast off their spiritual DNA, and ... aren't looking for anything except for Jewish absolution that will bring them closer to political power."
Similarly Dave Rich, spokesman of the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors antisemitic incidents in Britain, told me that far-right philosemites "must think we're pretty stupid if they think we'll get taken in by that. The moment their perceived political gain disappears they revert to type. We completely reject their idea that they hate Muslims so they like Jews. What targets one community at one time can very easily move on to target another community if the climate changes."
Rich's words, spoken before the murder of Jews in Toulouse <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/toulouse-shootings> , now sound chillingly prescient. The president of the French Jewish community, Richard Pasquier, judges Marine Le Pen more dangerous than her father.
French Muslim leaders rallied round Jewish communities <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/23/toulouse-shootings-united-france> last week. Next week sees the start of Passover, a festival celebrating the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt, when Jews often think about modern examples of oppression. Let's hope that French Jewish leaders use the occasion to rally round Muslim communities, and to remember that ultimately, racism is indiscriminate.
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http://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/international-dimensions/item/410-the-vote-for-marine-le-pen-an-american-anti-racist-view
Institute for Research and Education in Human Rights (IREHR) - Monday 30th April 2012 18:19
The vote for Marine Le Pen:
an American anti-racist view
by Leonard Zeskind* <http://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/international-dimensions/itemlist/user/56-leonardzeskind>
It was May 1, 1988 in Paris, and I watched as Jean-Marie Le Pen, a young girl dressed as Joan d'Arc, a line of sash-wearing dignitaries, and 40,000 Front National supporters marched through the streets in a May Day parade. It was the moment that the Front National's racist nationalism broke into the middle of French politics, after years (decades) on the margins. Le Pen won 4.4 million votes, about 14.7% of the total, in the first round of the presidential elections that year. At the time, I was used to monitoring Klan rallies in the American South, which never approximated the size and power of the rally that day. The Front National's fortunes have waxed and waned over the next two-plus decades since. Now, with a stunning six million votes (17.9% of the total) in the in the first round of the French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen has re-established the Front National as a leading voice for racist, anti-immigrant politics in Continental Europe.
The most immediate consequence of Le Pen's showing, as others have noted, has been a sharp racist appeal by President Sarkozy to Le Pen's constituents in the second round of campaigning. Sarkozy, heretofore an establishment conservative from the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), has in effect become a bull horn for the Front National's anti-immigrant, Islamophobic politics. The received wisdom is that Sarkozy will fail, and Socialist Francois Hollande is expected to be elected France's next president on May 6.
In June, however, the Front National will likely win seats in the national assembly in two rounds of voting. And if the party maintains its current strength into the 2014 elections to the European Parliament, it is certain to increase its representation in that body. If that happens, the net effect will be an increase in the power of the racist far right, even as the soft-core socialist left holds on to the presidency. At the same time, the Left Bloc, an amalgamation of a Socialist Party breakaway faction, the Communist Party and other smaller parties, which captured 11.1% of the vote in the first round, has made its first significant showing after a number of years of decline for the hard left.
Marine Le Pen in the USA
Marine Le Pen, the daughter of FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, rose to the top of the Front National in 2011. In the process, she defeated a challenge from Bruno Golnisch on the farthest right-wing edge of the party, and promised a kinder, gentler racism and xenophobia, unencumbered by her father's ill-tempered anti-Semitism. Indeed, in order to improve her "mainstream" appeal, Marine Le Pen traveled to the United States last November, with many from the Francophone media in tow.
Declaring her affinity for Ron Paul's positions on central banks, she finally finagled a meeting with the Texas congressman after he spent days dodging her overtures. She had less difficulty securing a meeting with Rep. Joe Walsh (R.-ILL.), a freshman congressman elected with Tea Party support. While in D.C., she had breakfast with lobbyist Richard Hines, former editor of Southern Partisan magazine, according to Ed Sebesta, an expert on the neo-Confederates. During the New York leg of the trip, Le Pen made noises about meeting Occupy Wall Street protestors, but did not go to Zuccotti Park and did not apparently meet with any Occupy activists as she walked around southern Manhattan. In New York and D.C., her attempt to appear like a visiting dignitary basically failed.
Marine Le Pen had better luck in Florida. According to press reports, she met with William Diamond in Palm Beach. Diamond, active in Republican Party circles, was supporting the candidacy of Herman Cain at the time of Le Pen's visit. He also claims to be big-time donor to the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Le Pen's visit with Diamond was obviously aimed at helping her wash off the stink from her father's anti-Semitism, and also to assist her effort to find support among French Jews for her Moslem-bashing campaign. She largely failed in that effort.
During her father's tenure, the Front National received continual and significantly favorable coverage from The Spotlight, the now defunct weekly tabloid published by the Liberty Lobby; founded and minutely managed by Willis Carto. (Carto, a long-time Holocaust denier, now publishes a different weekly tabloid with a smaller subscriber base, The American Free Press.) And Bruno Golnisch, Marine Le Pen's challenger for control of the party, has been an invited speaker to Jared Taylor's white nationalist American Renaissance conferences on multiple occasions, the most recent in February 2008. (Taylor, a Francophile, has repeatedly had speakers from France at his Renaissance gatherings and spoke this March to 700 racial nationalists at a conference held in Paris.)
Marine Le Pen's attempt to find American friends among the Republicans, rather than hard-core white nationalists, is part of her larger effort to "normalize" the Front National. According to an analysis written by French anti-fascists for the June 2011 edition of Searchlight magazine, much of the key activist base has now left the party (most going to organizations even further to the right). Nevertheless, "the FN is able to function better" with an influx of "thousands of inexperienced new members."
This change in the Front National does not alter the fact, that France has a solidly built and devoutly ideological racist and nationalist movement in its bowels. This is not a movement that gelled in opposition to President Sarkozy, but in opposition to the immigrants in its midst and the European Union that envelopes them. The anger that Front National voters feel towards Sarkozy has only served to accelerate the nationalism and racism that motivates them.
Finding a Response to the
Front National’s Racism
The left has had principally two different types of responses to this racist nationalist movement. The Socialist Party has virtually ignored the Front National's success, apparently hoping to build an alternative to the racists without directly confronting them. And anti-racist critics of the Socialist Party have for years noted that the organization SOS Racisme acts mainly as a campaign mechanism for the Socialist Party.
The Left Front, which won 11.1% of the vote, by contrast, decided to "organize a very front-on opposition to the Front National," according to Raquel Garrido, who quit the Socialist Party along with Jean Luc Melenchon, the Left Front's presidential candidate. Garrido said, "That's something no one will forget, that we were the ones that started the process of trying to strike back against the Front National...The Socialist Party doesn't do that. Even now, they are barely speaking about the Front's high score."
The Left Front obviously wants to both confront the Front National's entire program, as well as build an alternative to it. It is a lesson American anti-racists should not ignore.
*Leonard Zeskind is president of IREHR. For almost three decades, he has been a leading authority on white nationalist political and social movements. He is the author of Blood and Politics: The History of White Nationalism from the Margins to the Mainstream, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in May 2009. more... <http://www.irehr.org/about-irehr/staff-a-board> ]
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http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/austrian-jews-chide-likud-mk-for-meeting-far-right-leader-1.332597
Haaretz – Friday 24th December 2010 2:27 AM
Austrian Jews chide Likud MK
for meeting far-right leader
President of Austria’s Jewish community complains to
Netanyahu, charging that the meeting is a ‘stab in the back’.
by Barak Ravid <http://www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/barak-ravid-1.325>
Austria's Jewish community is furious at Deputy Minister Ayoob Kara for meeting in Vienna this week with Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the far-right FPO party, and heaping praise on him at a joint press conference.
In a letter sent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, Ariel Muzicant, the president of Austria's Jewish community, charged that Kara's "visit and actions are stabbing us in the back."
Netanyahu's office said he had not yet read the letter and would comment only after doing so.
"I am writing you this letter to express my deep anger," Muzicant began, noting that not only did Kara come at the FPO's invitation, but "he has officially honored and praised individuals of this party as well as their political program."
Muzicant noted that the party was founded by former Austrian Nazis in 1948, including many who had served in the SS, and when it entered the Austrian government a few years ago under former leader Joerg Haider, Israel scaled back its diplomatic relations with Austria.
The FPO has "called for the abolishment of anti-Nazi legislation," and its representatives have "made anti-Semitic remarks and praised the Nazi regime, denied the Holocaust or invited and promoted notorious Holocaust deniers," he wrote. As a result, the Jewish community has fought the party - "which was and is one of our worst adversaries" - for years.
"We feel betrayed and are outraged about this behavior of Deputy Minister Kara," he concluded. "I consider this a shame for the State of Israel and a betrayal of the murdered 65,000 Austrian Jews and the 6 million martyrs of the Shoa."
Kara, a Likud MK, did not coordinate his visit with the Foreign Ministry or the embassy in Vienna. When the ambassador found out, he urged Kara to cancel the Strache meeting, as Israel's policy is to boycott the FPO. But Kara refused, calling Strache "a friend of Israel" in its war on terror.
