"Our Weapon Is The Truth": The Golden Dawn Party Is Rising and Has Jews Scared, According to the ADL.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

The Golden Dawn Party Is Rising and Has Jews Scared, According to the ADL.

Open letter: we are all Greek Jews

The leader of the rightwing Golden Dawn party, Nikos Michaloliakosis, is sworn in to the Greek parliament in Athens on 17 May. Photograph: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA

Benjamin Abtan, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Elie Wiesel, Amélie Nothomb and others call on Europe to reject the extreme right

The neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn entered the Greek parliament this month. With its swastika-inspired emblem, Hitlerian salute, reference to Mein Kampf, antisemitic and racist ideology, Holocaust denial, violence against migrants, threats against journalists and personality cult, the party is the lineal heir of the German national-socialist party that led Europe and the world into chaos and bloodshed.

Unfortunately, Greece is not the only country threatened by this revival of Nazi ideology. In Latvia this year, the president of the republic has for the first time supported the annual former Waffen SS march, in spite of strong criticism. In Austria the FPÖ, an extreme right organisation that nurtures Third Reich nostalgia, is favourite in the polls for the next parliamentary elections. In Hungary, the Hungarian Guard Movement, descendant of The Arrow Cross party – the former militia responsible for the extermination of Jews and Gypsies – terrorises Jewish populations and holds direct responsibility for provoking deadly attacks against Roma people.

This revival was made possible by the systematic attack by extreme right parties against the republican ideal that recognises that everyone belongs to the same national community, together. This campaign against “togetherness” is modelled on Geert Wilders’ strategy for his Freedom party, launched in the early 2000s. The core of this strategy is to hide a rhetoric promoting race inequality behind a “cultural” fight against the so-called “Islamisation of Europe”.

In this ongoing economic and social crisis, which favours a frenzied search for scapegoats and strengthens the fear of the decline of the “old continent”, this strategy has been revealed to be worryingly efficient. It has also enabled extreme right parties to support – or even to become members of – governing coalitions, normalising racist and antisemitic speech along the way. This new extreme right has also paved the way for parties which, just like Golden Dawn, can now legitimately win votes while openly promoting hate speech.

Faced with this terrifying situation – exemplified by the election of neo-Nazis deputies in the Greek parliament – we are asserting our solidarity: we are all Greek Jews.

Golden Dawn Rising in Greece

Neo-Nazi party gets 7 percent of Greek vote; Jewish community rattled

“The Jewish community is examining the situation,” said the head of the Greek Jewish community in Salonika, a city that in the 17th century was a majority-Jewish metropolis. He was referring to the 7 percent of the vote that Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi party, received in elections Sunday. “Right now, Golden Dawn is not coming out against Jews,” he added. “Instead, it attacks immigrants. Still, there are right-wing extremists, and we need to assess the situation and see how Greece’s democracy will deal with this. There is no reason for worry.” Unless, that is, you count the 21 seats (out of 300) Golden Dawn will have in the new parliament; the 750,000 Greeks who cast their vote for the party (as opposed to the 5,000 Greek Jews), a massive gain from the last elections; and the anti-Semitism that some report at party rallies.

And then there is Golden Dawn founder and leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos giving a victory speech (h/t Neil Ungerleider), after, charmingly, one of his goons berates journalists for not standing and showing proper respect.

“We will continue the struggle for a Greece liberated from global speculators,” Michaloliakos declares. “For a Greece without the slavery of the bailout agreement and the surrender of our national sovereignty. For a Greece that will not be a social jungle because of the millions of illegal immigrants they brought into our homeland, without asking us.”

Am I being paranoid? “The new dawn of Hellenism is rising,” Michaloliakos adds. thank you Brian