Racism & Fascism - in brief (10)
01 August 2006
Austria/UK: Anti-Semitic Holocaust-denier released early: The discredited anti-Semitic "historian" and Holocaust denier, David Irving, was unexpectedly released from Josefstadt prison in Vienna, Austria after a Supreme Court ruling in December. The court ruled that Irving, who had spent just over one year of a three year sentence in prison, should serve the remainder of his term on probation. Irving was arrested in November 2005 after entering Austria illegally to address a meeting of far-right students. He was convicted of Holocaust denial in April for two speeches he made in 1989 which dismissed the Holocaust as a "fairytale" and denied the existence of the nazi gas chambers at Auschwitz. Austria is one of several countries, including Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland, which have laws against Holocaust denial. The Austrian law targets "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide". Explaining his decision, Judge Ernest Maurer claimed that Irving had undergone a "conversion" and now accepts that the Holocaust did take place and there was, therefore, no danger that he would reoffend; Maurer's opinion was described as extremely naive by anti-fascists who expect Irving to return to the Holocaust denial circuit once he arrives in the UK. He has already said that he will urge an academic boycott of historians from Germany and Austria until they stopped jailing historians. Several countries have banned Irving from entering their territory including Austria, Germany and Australia.
BBC News 21.12.06.
Belgium: Far right makes big gains: The far right
Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest, formerly the Vlaams Bloc) made significant gains in Belgium's local elections in early October. The party's vote increased by more than 5 percentage points to reach twenty per cent in the 308 municipal councils across Flanders, the northern Dutch speaking part of the country. It appears that in the organisation's stronghold of Antwerp, Belgium's second largest city, they failed to make further progress on the one third of the vote that the
Vlams Bloc had attained in previous elections [confirm this]. These results would seem to indicate that the party has extended its influence beyond its Antwerp powerbase, although it is not clear if it has made enough progress to force other political parties to share power with it. Until now the mainstream Belgian parties have operated a cordon sanitaire to keep the
Vlams Bloc out of power because of their racist, Islamaphobic and anti-immigrant policies. Shortly before the elections the far right party's leader, Filip DeWinter, called on Jewish voters to join forces with
Vlaams Belang "against the main enemy of the moment, the radical Islamic fundamentalism."
The Vlams Belang is just the latest extreme right political party to make electoral gains; elsewhere the far right has had successes in Poland, Slovakia, Germany and France in recent months.
Independent 5.10.06.