austria 2008/9

 

Austria witnessed a decrease in antisemitic manifestations in 2008, mostly expressed in written and spoken abuse of individual Jews, Jews in general and Israel by circles associated with the Austrian Freedom Party. Such attacks intensified during Israel’s war in Gaza.

 

the jewish community

Austria has a Jewish population of 10,000 out of a total population of 8 million. Most registered members of the community are affiliated to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG − Jewish Community Vienna). The community, largely located in Vienna, is made up of several groups, the most numerous being returnee Austrians and their families, as well as former refugees from Eastern Europe. A Jewish primary school and high school, as well as several Jewish publications, such as the monthlies Die Gemeinde and Aufbau and the quarterly David, serve the needs of the community.

 

extremist parties and groups

Extreme Right

The continually radicalizing FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party) posted some impressive election gains in 2008. At the National Assembly elections in September, it obtained 17.5 percent of the vote, a rise of 6.5 percent; at the state elections in Vorarlberg, also in September, 25.3 percent (+12.4 percent); and in Oberösterreich (Upper Austria), 15.3 percent (+6.9 percent). Its campaigns were openly racist, with anti-Muslim slogans, and in Vorarlberg undertones of antisemitism. It should be noted, however, that the attitude of senior FPÖ officials regarding anti-Muslim propaganda is not unequivocal. In January 2008, during an election campaign in Graz, the leading FPÖ candidate Susanne Winter called the Prophet Mohamed a “child abuser,” who wrote the Qu’ran during “epileptic bouts.” Some German and Austrian neo-Nazis applauded this statement, but the majority rejected it as a provocation “on behalf of Zionism.”

            The appearances of FPÖ chairman Heinz-Christian Strache attracted a large number of neo-Nazis and Hitler salutes were clearly visible on video recordings of rallies. Some FPÖ leaders also participated in neo-Nazi meetings. In October 2008 Hans-Georg Jenewein, FPÖ secretary of state in Vienna, lectured at the “43 Political Academy” of the neo-Nazi AFP (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für demokratische Politik) and made antisemitic remarks during the year (see below).

            As noted in previous years, there is considerable overlap between the FPÖ and neo-Nazi circles, both content- and personnel-wise. The RFJ FPÖ Youth (Ring Freiheitlicher Jugend) is an example of such association and in Upper Austria and Styria a range of personnel overlaps with the neo-Nazi Bund Freier Jugend (BFJ) was made public in 2008. Some German neo-Nazis contribute to the bi-monthly magazine Die Aula, which has close ties to the FPÖ. In April 2008 Jürgen Gansel (NPD), for instance, objected to “the foreign infiltration of people of different culture and race.”

            The continuing political gains of the FPÖ led to increased activity and boldness on the part of the militant extreme right, and there was an increase of neo-Nazi attacks on political opponents. Neo-Nazis often go to neighboring countries to rally as their demonstrations have been banned in Austria since the FPÖ left the government in 2005 (as in the years before the FPÖ came to power in 2000).

            On March 29, more than 5,000 people gathered in Vienna city center to support the nationalist slogan “Neutrality saves. No to the EU Treaty, organized by the racist tabloid Neue Kronen Zeitung and the anti-EU movement. More than 200 neo-Nazis followers of Gottfried Küssel, founder (in the 1980s) and leader of the neo-Nazi organization VAPO (Volkstreue Außerparlamentarische Opposition) were among them. Also among the participating groups was the National People’s Party (NVP), founded in early 2008 as a political organization, despite the laws banning Nazi propaganda and political agitation. Part of its program appeared to be identical to a manual published by the SS-Hauptamt (SS Main Administration) called Education Plan for the Political Education of the SS and the Police. Although it was barred from competing in the Upper Austrian provincial and municipal elections, the NVP’s neo-Nazi agitation was increasingly more open and provocative.

 

Extreme Left

The isolation of the extreme left has begun to erode in recent years. Even SPÖ (Social Democratic Party of Austria) circles have ceased distancing themselves from anti-Israel groups. Thus, for example the AIK (Antiimperialistische Koordination), which disguises its support for Hamas as aid to the civilian population in the Gaza Strip, aroused sympathy through its campaign “Gaza must live” (Gaza muss leben). More than 900 surfers on the Internet signed a petition during the year 2008 demanding the removal of the blockade of the Gaza Strip without a cessation of the shelling of Israeli cities beforehand. The AIK continues to struggle against the “[Jews’] misuse of the Holocaust.” However, it denies the existence of antisemitism, claiming that “neither its political nor social causes continue to exist nor does it serve its former propagators as a political-social instrument.” Only “Zionism” profited from antisemitism, which explains why it tries to “encourage it.”

 

Antisemitic activities

Government sources reported 333 extreme right criminal (2007: 280), 56 racist (2007: 48) and 23 (2007: 15) antisemitic acts in 2008. In 2008 eight individuals were injured as a result of racist or antisemitic motives (2007: 5). According to the Forum against Antisemitism, there were 46 antisemitic incidents in 2008 (2007: 62), including one physical assault (2007: 1), 2 acts of vandalism to property (2007: 2) and 7 incidents of threats and abuse (2007: 12).

 

Propaganda

As in previous years, the president of the IKG (Jewish community) Vienna, Ariel Muzicant, continued to be the target of insults of FPÖ politicians. FPÖ secretary of state in Vienna Hans-Georg Jenewein claimed that Muzicant would only sanction parties joining the government that had the IKG’s “moral legitimation.”

            Israel is another target of the FPÖ. Speaking to the German news magazine Der Spiegel (41/08), FPÖ MP Harald Stefan announced he would celebrate the termination of diplomatic relations with Austria by Israel if the FPÖ joined the government. “I will open a bottle of champagne when the Israeli ambassador won’t be in Vienna anymore,” he said. The former Carinthian FPÖ MP Karlheinz Klement published an openly antisemitic text on his homepage, previously posted on the neo-Nazi website Altermedia. Responding to criticism by the Israeli media of the collective hysteria following the death of Jörg Haider in a car accident in October 2008, he proclaimed that once all Jews were dead, there would be, “a sense of relief and satisfaction, especially in the German-speaking world.” He openly threatened extermination or a “second lesson,” since Jews “have not learned anything from history,” as the criticism from Israel proved.

            The pro-FPÖ weekly and state-funded Zur Zeit, published by FPÖ-MEP Andreas Mölzer, combines antisemitism with apocalyptic theories. On January 25, 2008 the paper proclaimed that the world was already “aflame” due to the (Jewish) Antichrist “behind the Zionist mask of Israel and the United States of America.” In September 2008, exiled Hungarian journalist Johann F. Balvany, a member of the Viennese Association of the Foreign Press, claimed that Hungary was “an Israeli European beachhead”: Jews who had originally emigrated and fled to Israel, “had seeped back… and established themselves in politics, economy and culture after the regime turnaround in Budapest in 1990.” Overall, Israel was following “in the footsteps of the Soviet occupying power.” In Turkey, too, there were Jews everywhere; even the founder of the state Kemal Atatürk tried to “conceal his alleged Jewish roots.” To this day, “many generals [in Turkey]… of Jewish origin are… holders of key positions in the media and economy.” An antisemitic caricature blamed the August 2008 Georgian-Russian war on the Jews.

            In its 16/09 issue Die Aula, extreme right-wing author Heinz Thomann (see also below) claimed he – in line with 36 percent of Austrians, according to an ADL survey conducted in 2009 – believes that “there is to much economic power in the hands of Jews worldwide.” He also notes approvingly that “nearly 50 percent of the people” had declared that “members of the Jewish people” were the cause of the 2008 “economic crisis.”

            A group of Catholic fundamentalists, operating anonymously, runs the site kreuz.net, which is filled with attacks on Jews and Judaism, feminists and other dissenters from the “pure doctrine.” The Holocaust is openly denied. On this difficult-to-access forum, neo-Nazis from Austria and Germany, with Nazi nicknames, greet each other with “Heil Hitler” and swap ideas on various antisemitic and racist issues. (“Each Jew running free is an advertisement for the next Holocaust”).

 

Attitudes toward the Holocaust

In early 2009, FPÖ MEP Andreas Mölzer referred in Zur Zeit to remembrance of Holocaust victims as a “civil-religion,” and to mass murder in the gas chambers to the “dogmas to which you’re not allowed to doubt, but in which you have to believe with fervor.

            In mid-January 2008 Austrian lawyer and Holocaust denier Herbert Schaller, who defended British Holocaust denier David Irving during his trial in Austria in 2005, spoke of Austria’s Nazi prohibition law to the state-published Wiener Zeitung, and proposed denial of the Holocaust as a legitimate opinion. He also spoke on these issues during the year to groups of right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis both at home and abroad. Although his extended fight “against the gas chambers” has led to several disciplinary proceedings against him by the Austrian legal association, he is immune to facing charges in a court of law because he is a lawyer.

            In April 2008 Zur Zeit celebrated the Nazi “economy and social politics,” culminating in the claims that World War II and thus the beginning of the end of the economic and social boom only began “with the declaration of war by Great Britain and France on September 3, 1939.” The extreme right newspaper Die Umwelt remembered the 70th anniversary of the annexation of Austria in neo-Nazi style. In an article entitled “1938 – the Happy Year,” editor Hemma Tiffner spoke of her “joy about the annexation.”

            Wehrmacht and SS veterans at Ulrichsberg in Carinthia were joined by Austrian and German neo-Nazis for their annual meeting in September 2008. Two days before, 15 hooded neo-Nazis attacked and hurt some anti-fascists, who were demonstrating against the event.

            In November 2008, some 100-150 veteran Nazis and young neo-Nazis marched to the Vienna Zentralfriedhof (central cemetery) and gathered at the grave of the Nazi “pilot hero” Walter Nowotny, to mark his death in 1944, at the invitation of the FPÖ-associated Vereins zur Pflege des Grabes Walter Nowotny. FPÖ-MP Lutz Weinzinger declared that Nowotny was a “war hero, an honorable man, a model.”

 

The Period of Operation Cast Lead

The war in Gaza was used by the extreme right for further attacks on the head of the Jewish community in Austria and on the Jewish people in general. In Die Aula (16/09), Heinz Thomann branded Ariel Muzicant “the Tel-Aviv immigrant,” and held the Jews themselves responsible for the fanatic hatred against them: Antisemitism was legitimate as Israel had tried to “annihilate once and for all in the fashion of the Old Testament... the rest of the hopelessly oppressed… Palestinian people… in the open air-concentration camp the Gaza Strip.” Thomann even observed a “delusive wish for annihilation in the Talmudic sense” at work in Israel. And “the Zionist Muzicant” kept quiet about all this.

            FPÖ chairman in Styria Gerhard Kurzmann accused Israel in a press release of systematic war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Confusing Hamas and Hizballah, he stated: “It’s unbearable, how the Israeli army is conducting war against children, women and the elderly under the guise of self-defense.” FPÖ general secretary Harald Vilimsky referred to an “Israeli campaign of destruction against the Palestinians.” The FPÖ press release made no mention of Hamas rocket fire into Israel.

            In early 2009, two RFJ activists claimed, in an article that was retrievable for a short time on the website of RFJ-Tirol, that Israel would lead a “war of extermination against the Palestinians…. What in every other nation at any other time would count as genocide and war crimes, is deemed to be self defense for the Jewish occupiers.” However, the chairman of FPÖ Tirol Gerhard Hauser pronounced such statements “radical right wing” and stressed that the FPÖ had “nothing to do with [them].”

            Officials of the Muslim community, who in previous years had been criticized for their close ties to Hamas, were successful in preventing organized protest action by their members. The extreme left tried to stir them up (also against their own officials), but they failed. Thus, only about 5,000 protesters answered the AIK call for a “Solidarity with Gaza” demonstration in Vienna on January 9.

            There were a number of antisemitic incidents during this period in Tyrol. Antisemitic graffiti, together with the slogan “Boycott Israel!” and a Magen David merged with a swastika, was reported in January, and on the 10th of the month bottles were thrown at the synagogue in Innsbruck by pro-Palestinian protesters. Similar manifestations were registered until March.