Sara Wildman wrote recently in the New Republic - Guess Who's Coming to Seder? - on the further evolution of the European far-right. Neo-nazis in Belgium, the inheritors of those parties which willingly collaborated with the Nazis, are dropping their traditional anti-semitism in favour of vocal support for "their" Jews and Israel against the supposed threat from Muslim immigrants. She quotes one local far-right leader:
"We should stand with the Jewish community, and we should do everything possible to protect them," he says. "Jewish values are European values!" Then he launches into an earnest plea for Jews to come home to his extreme-right--"right-wing," he gently corrects--party.
Dewinter is at the forefront of Europe's new philosemitic far right. Along with his French homologue, Marine Le Pen, daughter of Holocaust minimizer and Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, Dewinter has spent the last few years proclaiming his support for Jews and championing their rights. No matter that Vlaams Belang's founders were Nazi collaborators or, simply, that the idea of the Jew as "European" is itself a novelty for his base constituency. Since 2003, Dewinter has loudly and consistently spoken out against attacks on Jews--calling Judaism a "pillar of European society" to Time magazine and condemning anti-Semitism and, very specifically, anti-Zionism, to Haaretz and New York Jewish Week. This fall, when elections fell on Sukkot and religious Jews would have missed going to the polls, it was Dewinter's party that helped collect their proxy ballots. In October, he promised the press he would bring in one-third of the Jewish vote on Election Day and told Haaretz that Jews were his "brothers in arms".
In many ways, this is hardly surprising. We something of the same evolution of hatred among the American extreme-right when American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell dropped prejudice against Catholics and southern Europeans in favour of a unified bloc of "white power" confronting the "black power" of the Black Panthers. David Duke, the Louisiana KKK leader and one-time Republican candidate for governor, went further, ditching the hood or stormtrooper uniforms for business suits and sound bytes. The Belgians now seem, unlike Duke, who's still an outspoken anti-Semite, to go further. As a result, they seem to be succeeding in their quest for respectability, as the Italian neo-fascists did earlier before entering government.
The British neo-nazis, in the shape of the BNP, seem to be the dimmer pupils in the class. In spite of the efforts of Cambridge law graduate Nick Griffin, the party is still the refuge of skinheads and neo-nazis, hiding behind an imperfect disguise. One Irish guy I know was nearly killed in a random attack by a group of party activists who abducted and tried to murder him by throwing him off a bridge after asking him the time in an east London High Street. The mask slipped again recently when a party candidate was convicted of stockpiling weapons for a race war after being turned in by his wife.
The BNP seems to have a number of Jewish members, including some councilors, and an activist that I meet at Birkbeck College, who assured me that I would be welcome to co-operate as a "European". I was and remain unconvinced.
Still, it wouldn't surprise me if there were more British Jews in the BNP than in Neturei Karta, the anti-Zionist religious extremists who got so much press for their visit, in the company of David Duke himself, to Tehran's Holocaust denial conference recently after being feted, bizarrely, by elements of the left as some sort of moral exemplars representing the true universalist spirit of Judaism, presumably for burning down video stores that rent DVDs of Free Willy.
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