SWITZERLAND 2001-2

 

There was a rise in the number of antisemitic incidents recorded in Switzerland in 2001. Antisemitic accusations were made in the context of the Middle East conflict and following the September 11 attacks in the US. Ties between right-wing extremists and Islamists were revealed in the wake of the attacks.

 

The Jewish Community

Some 18,000 Jews live in Switzerland out of a total population of 7.13 million. More than half live in the German-speaking part of the country. Some small communities, such as those in La Chaux-de-Fonds and Biel, are declining since younger people are moving to larger cities. The umbrella organization of Swiss Jews is the Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund/Fédération Suisse des Communautés Israélites (SIG/FSCI). The German-language Jewish publications Israelitisches Wochenblatt and Jüdische Rundschau merged under the name Tachles in April 2001.

 

POLITICAL PARTIES AND EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY GROUPS

Political Parties

The Swiss parliament opposed lifting the immunity of MP Christoph Blocher of the Zurich branch of the Schweizerische Volkspartei/Union Démocratique du Centre (Swiss People’s Party – SVP/UDC). Blocher was sued for using antisemitic stereotypes in a 1997 speech. As a result, he cannot be tried for violating the anti-racism law (see also ASW 1999/2000).

Xenophobic and racist opinions are often expressed within institutional parties. Kark Kissling, a Christian Democrat from Solothurn, was expelled from the party after he publicly held Jews responsible for the September 11 attacks in the US. Geneva Mayor Manuel Tornare (and representatives of some Islamic organizations, such as Hafid Ouardiri, spokesman of the Geneva mosque, and Hani Ramadan, head of the Geneva Islamic Center), claimed the attacks were a direct consequence of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

 

Extreme Right Groups

Emboldened by the intifada and the September 11 attacks, far right groups revived antisemitic accusations of a Jewish conspiracy and of Jewish power. Such allegations were made in the newsletters of Vérité & Justice (V&J), based in Châtel-Saint-Denis (near Fribourg) and headed by Holocaust deniers Jürgen Graf (who fled to Iran in order to avoid serving a 15-month prison term for racial discrimination), Philippe Brennenstuhl and René-Louis Berclaz. V&J was a co-sponsor, together with the California-based Institute for Historical Review, of the aborted conference on revisionism and Zionism, scheduled to have taken place in March 2001 in Beirut (see Arab Countries). The group has published reprints of antisemitic classics such as The International Jew by Henry Ford and Jewish Austria by F. Trocase. In November 2001, the public prosecutor of Fribourg demanded in a civil court that the group be dissolved because of its Holocaust denial activities, and its assets transferred to the local authorities. The Court of Justice of Veveyse closed the post office box of the group, as well as Berclaz’s personal bank account. In March 2002 a Châtel-Saint-Denis court declared the group illegal and gave prison sentences to Berclaz (8 months) and Brennenstuhl (3 months). They continued to publish the newsletter, which was also available on the Internet, during 2001 since they had not begun their sentences.

The pseudo-intellectual New Right, led by Geneva lawyer Pascal Junod, arranges lectures on a regular basis, often by convicted French racists or Holocaust deniers such as Guillaume Faye and Roger Garaudy. Organizations such as Cercle Proudhon, Cercle Thulé, Synergies Européennes and Amis de Robert Brasillach belong to the New Right.

The Partei National Orientierter Schweiz (PNOS), formed in September 2000 and headed by Sacha Kunz, maintains ties with the German neo-Nazi NPD through, for example, Swiss Holocaust denier Bernhard Schaub, and maintains a website (http://www.pnos.net).

Skinhead numbers and activities increased in 2001. According to the federal police, they numbered about 1,000 and organized, in 2001, 60, sometimes violent, gatherings in Switzerland, which attracted sympathizers from throughout Europe. Propaganda material such as books, videos, CDs, clothes and flags were sold at these events, which are advertised as “private” gatherings, regardless of the numbers attending, so that the organizers might avoid the anti-racism laws, applicable only to public events. New skinhead recruits are younger (12–13 years old), more radical and are more likely to carry guns. A former skinhead, Marcel von Allmen, 19, was whipped to death after he broke the code of silence and described some of the movement’s activities. Another extremist, Marcel Strebel, co-founder of the Patriotic Front, was killed in a fight.

The September 11 events revealed ties between far right circles and Islamic extremists. (The Muslim population numbers 310,000, representing 4.5 percent of the total population.) Ahmed Huber, a Swiss Holocaust denier who converted to Islam, serves as a link between the extreme right and Islamist groups. Huber is a director of the Lugano-based company Al-Taqwa, which is suspected of financing the September 11 attacks. Al-Taqwa, which changed its name to Nada Management Organization, was raided by the police after the attacks. In November 2001, Huber organized in Lucerne a gathering “against world Zionist domination and the American Satan.” He also gave a lecture to the neo-pagan Avalon circle, headed by Roger Wüthrich. Far right extremists admire Muslims and share a common enmity toward Jews and Americans. Quoting Hitler, Huber told the weekly l’Hebdo (29 Nov. 2001) that the world should be divided between the swastika in the Western world and the crescent over the East. Wüthrich declared that “Muslims are the far right’s only allies.” It is noteworthy that racist Internet sites no longer target Arabs or Muslims, and that some ultra-right groups justified the September 11 attacks.

 

antisemitic activity

A rise in the number of antisemitic incidents was recorded in 2001, mainly in the form of graffiti, insults, hate mail and threats. The murder of an Israeli rabbi, Abraham Grünbaum, who was visiting Zurich in June, may have been antisemitically motivated, but no one claimed responsibility and no clues were found at the scene of the crime. A mentally ill person was arrested on suspicion of the murder, but later released.

Immediately after the murder of Rabbi Grünbaum, antisemitic jokes appeared on the chat forums of Swissonline. Following protests by Aktion Kinder des Holocaust, a task force which fights dissemination of hate on the Internet, the joke-writer was banned by the provider and the text erased.

Anonymous antisemitic tracts, posters and stickers were distributed in schools and mailboxes and posted in streets; they denounced a Jewish conspiracy, Jewish racism and Jewish responsibility for Switzerland’s problems.

Former MP Geneviève Aubry continued in 2001 to publish the extreme right, antisemitic and anti-American L’Atout, which appears in print as well as online. In Basel, Ernst Indlekofer distributes Recht+Freiheit and its French version Droit+Liberté, in which he claims the UN is dominated by Jewish and Masonic powers. Lausanne-based Holocaust deniers Claude and Mariette Paschoud have found funding to continue publishing Le Pamphlet; however, Alfred Künzli from Geneva appears to have stopped distributing the antisemitic Euronews. Another extreme rightist Max Wahl has found a discrete way of sending his newsletter Notizen to friends, thus avoiding prosecution.

At the end of 2001, an old national debate resurfaced in Switzerland after the government decided, on legal grounds, to lift a long existing ban on ritual animal slaughter {shechita]. The Swiss people had voted against ritual animal slaughter in 1873, in the wake of an antisemitic campaign to prevent Jews from settling in Switzerland. Since then, Jews and Muslims have had to import kosher or hallal meat. The recent debate includes violent racist and antisemitic rhetoric, in which Jews or Muslims are considered “barbaric,” and follow “archaic principles” which they want to “impose” on Switzerland, even though they are only “guests” there. Samuel Debrot, president of the Vaud section of the Society for the Protection of Animals, which leads the campaign against the importation of kosher or hallal meat, stated that Jews and Muslims should “either become vegetarians or leave the country.” Among other opponents of ritual slaugher is Erwin Kessler, president of Verein gegen Tierfabrik (Association against Animal Factories), who was convicted in 2001 of racial discrimination and violence-related charges and sentenced to nine months imprisonment, which he has appealed. He has had previous convictions for comparing Jewish ritual slaughter of animals to the Nazi treatment of Jews. Kessler has close contacts with Holocaust-deniers and openly supports the far right. Opponents of ritual slaughter are currently collecting signatures in order to decide the matter in a referendum, which will be held in 2003 at the earliest.

 

Israel and the Middle East

The situation in the Middle East generated a wave of reactions in Switzerland, mostly supportive of the Palestinians and some of them downright antisemitic. Many demonstrations were held to support the Palestinian cause. Slogans and leaflets at these demonstrations denounced “the massacre of the Palestinian people” and “Israel’s apartheid policy,” and alleged Israeli responsibility for the September 11 attacks. Letters to the editor and media commentators blurred the distinction between Jews and Israelis, compared the Sharon government to the Nazi regime and Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, combined criticism of Israeli policies with stereotypes of “the Jewish lobby manipulating Washington,” accused “the Chosen People” of being above the law,” and blamed Jews for antisemitism. In a letter to the editor of 21 April in Tagblatt, a priest, Father Kurt Staub from Rehetobler, claimed Zionism supported ethnic cleansing, which it executed through wars and terror. In a few cases, the authors of blatantly antisemitic statements – for example, a technician from Swiss national television who said the Jews had too much power and that they should learn to love others before they can be loved themselves, and four or five teachers in the French-speaking part of Switzerland – were dismissed from their jobs or reprimanded by their superiors.

Israel’s response to the intifada was exploited by some Swiss citizens to retaliate in kind against criticism of Swiss behavior in the matter of Holocaust victims’ assets in Swiss banks. “You lectured us on morality and justice, but look at how you treat the Palestinians,” was a common accusation in letters to the editors of local newspapers as well as in public forums.

At the United Nations World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, the Swiss delegation maintained a low profile. It considered “unacceptable” some wording in the conference final resolution concerning Israel, but did not participate in workshops which dealt with “problematic questions.” The Forum against Racism, the national federation of Swiss NGOs, which was also present at the conference, declared its “satisfaction with the final documents” issued by West European NGOs and considered the “NGOs’ declaration and action program an indispensable base to pursue our work”; this, in spite of the fact that antisemitic and anti-Israel references in the documents were abundant and highly abusive.

 

attitudes toward the Holocaust

The national debate over Switzerland’s stand during World War II came to an end with the publication of the last of twelve reports (in March 2002) by the Independent Experts’ Commission, headed by historian Jean-François Bergier. The reports examined, inter alia, Swiss financial ties with the Nazi regime (Swiss holdings of IG Farben, exports of electricity and secret banking operations), as well as legal questions and specific issues (looting of artwork and Swiss asylum policy). Generally, the findings in the publications aroused little public interest except from some among the wartime generation who were very critical from the outset. The findings showed that Switzerland’s discriminatory asylum policy contributed to the Holocaust, that Swiss neutrality was manipulated to serve political and economic interests, and that banks did not actively collaborate with the Nazis during the war.

The Special Fund for needy Holocaust victims, headed by Rolf Bloch, distributed SF298 million ($175 million) to beneficiaries around the world: Jews, political victims, Roma, homosexuals, handicapped people, Christians of Jewish descent, Jehovah witnesses and Righteous among the Nations. The fund was due to complete its mission in May 2002.

The global settlement reached in 1998 between Swiss banks and representatives of class action suits has still not led to an effective distribution of money to heirs of Holocaust victims who held Swiss bank accounts. A third list of dormant account holders was published, containing 21,000 names “with a possible link to victims of Nazism,” bringing the total of this group to 33,000. Considering this number to be very low, the Federal Court in Brooklyn has ordered a new examination of 580,000 applications by Holocaust survivors or their heirs.

            The Swiss Solidarity Foundation, announced in 1997 by President Kaspar Villiger, intended to use a part of Swiss national gold reserves for humanitarian projects. This idea seems to have been compromised, however, because the various political parties cannot agree on how the gold will be used. It was rejected altogether in a referendum held in September 2002.

Both the Reformed Evangelical Church and the Roman Catholic Central Conference of Switzerland sponsored studies about their respective church’s behavior during World War II. The report of the former noted that church policy was characterized by cautiousness and that the church had resisted appeals from the Association of Churches to assist refugees because of antisemitism. The Catholic Church report revealed that the Caritas organization helped mainly Aryan Catholics and Jews baptized as Catholics, adopting the racist categories of Aryan, half-Aryan and non-Aryan for the fugitives. Both churches paid tribute in their reports to individuals who helped refugees.

The Jewish community and mainstream publications such as Blick criticized a decision by the Zurich Ring Theater to present a satire based on the writings of Joseph Goebbels. Director Andre Steger said he wanted to demonstrate how language was used as a manipulative tool by the Nazis.

 

responses to racism and antisemitism

Reactions to antisemitism were scarce outside the Jewish community. Most political, social, religious and activist organizations distanced themselves from the Middle East conflict, or openly adopted a position in favor of the Palestinians and refused to condemn antisemitic manifestations.

In Switzerland, efforts in schools to inculcate tolerance and fight racism rely on local NGOs, religious communities or individuals for financial and other support. As of December 2001, the Department of Foreign Affairs has allocated SF10 million (about $6 million) to national organizations and special projects to combat racial discrimination. Most of the money went to the Federal Commission against Racism, a government agency.

The Basel police confirmed that they intended to register right-wing extremists and skinheads who provoked disturbances. The index cards would remain on file for a limited period.

Forty-four Swiss extreme right homepages were closed by the provider Yahoo! by February 2001, due to pressure by the Aktion Kinder des Holocaust organization. The organization is continuing to pressure other providers to block access to, or close, other Swiss far right sites.

Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, publisher of the monthly Courrier du Continent, who was convicted of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, had his one year sentence reduced to three months in a court of appeal. He had not yet begun serving his sentence by late 2002.

A skinhead couple was given prison sentences in March for selling racist CDs, which denigrated Jews and blacks.