Please make sure to click the link to the video below as well, it disturbingly portrays the viciousness and growth of the once marginalized Golden Dawn.:

Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn goes global with political ambitions

Link to video: Golden Dawn party infiltrates Greece’s police, claims senior officer

Helena Smith in Athens

Buoyed by its meteoric domestic success, the far right party is planning to expand ‘wherever there are Greeks’

Emboldened by its meteoric rise in Greece, the far-right Golden Dawn party is spreading its tentacles abroad, amid fears it is acting on its pledge to “create cells in every corner of the world”. The extremist group, which forged links with British neo-Nazis when it was founded in the 1980s, has begun opening offices in Germany, Australia, Canada and the US.

The international push follows successive polls that show Golden Dawn entrenching its position as Greece’s third, and fastest growing, political force. First catapulted into parliament with 18 MPs last year, the ultra-nationalists captured 11.5% support in a recent survey conducted by polling company Public Issue.

The group – whose logo resembles the swastika and whose members are prone to give Nazi salutes – has gone from strength to strength, promoting itself as the only force willing to take on the “rotten establishment”. Amid rumours of backing from wealthy shipowners, it has succeeded in opening party offices across Greece.

It is also concentrating on spreading internationally, with news last month that it had opened an office in Germany and planned to set up branches in Australia. The party’s spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris, said it had decided to establish cells “wherever there are Greeks”.

“People have understood that Chrysi Avgi [Golden Dawn] tells the truth,” he told a Greek-language paper in Melbourne. “In our immediate sights and aims is the creation of an office and local organisation in Melbourne. In fact, very soon a visit of MPs to Australia is planned.”

Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris (centre) leaves an Athens court this month where he denied assisting in a 2007 assault and robbery. He has said the party will spread ‘wherever there are Greeks’. Photograph: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP

But the campaign has met with disgust and derision by many prominent members of the Greek diaspora who represent communities in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

“We don’t see any gold in Golden Dawn,” said Father Alex Karloutsos, one of America’s leading Greek community figures, in Southampton, New York. “Nationalism, fascism, xenophobia are not part of our spiritual or cultural heritage.”

But Golden Dawn is hoping to tap into the deep well of disappointment and fury felt by Greeks living abroad, in the three years since the debt-stricken nation was plunged into crisis.

“Golden Dawn is not like other parties in Greece. From its beginnings, in the early 80s, it always had one eye abroad,” said Dimitris Psarras, whose book, Golden Dawn’s Black Bible, chronicles the organisation since its creation by Nikos Michaloliakos, an overt supporter of the colonels who oversaw seven years of brutal anti-leftist dictatorship until the collapse of military rule in 1974.

“Like-minded groups in Europe and Russia have given the party ideological, and sometimes financial, support to print books and magazines. After years of importing nazism, it now wants to export nazism,” added Psarras. By infiltrating communities abroad, the far-rightists were attempting not only to shore up their credibility but also to find extra funding and perhaps even potential votes if Greeks abroad ever won the right to cast ballots in elections.

“[Golden Dawn] not only wants to become the central pole of a pan-European alliance of neo-Nazis, even if in public it will hotly deny that,” claimed Psarras, who said party members regularly met with neo-Nazis from Germany, Italy and Romania. “It wants to spread its influence worldwide.”

With its 300,000-strong community, Melbourne has pride of place in the constellation of Greek-populated metropolises that dot a diaspora officially estimated at around 7 million.

A Golden Dawn election rally in Athens in April.

As part of its international push, Golden Dawn has also focused on the US, a magnet for migrants for generations, and Canada, which attracted tens of thousands of Greeks after Greece’s devastating 1946-49 civil war.

“It’s a well-studied campaign,” said Anastasios Tamis, Australia’s pre-eminent ethnic Greek historian. “There is a large stock of very conservative people here – former royalists, former loyalists to the junta, that sort of thing – who are very disappointed at what has been happening in Greece and are trying to find a means to express it. They are nationalists who feel betrayed by Greece over issues like Macedonia, Cyprus and [the Greek minority] in Voreio Epirus [southern Albania], who cannot see the fascistic part of this party. Golden Dawn is trying to exploit them.”

The younger generation — children of agrarian and unskilled immigrants – were also being targeted, he said. “They’re the generation who were born here and grew up here and know next to nothing about Greece, its history and social and economic background. They’re easy prey and Golden Dawn will capitalise on their ignorance.”

Tamis, who admits that some of his students support the organisation, does not think the group will gain traction even if Australia’s far-right party has been quick to embrace it. But the prospect of Golden Dawn descending on the country has clearly sent tremors through the Greek community.

“This is a multicultural society. They are not wanted or welcome here,” said one prominent member, requesting anonymity when talk turned to the group.

Greek Australian leftists have begun collecting protest signatures to bring pressure on the Australia immigration minister, Brendan O’Connor, to prohibit Golden Dawn MPs from entering the country. In a statement urging the government not to give the deputies visas, they said the extremists had to be stopped “from spreading their influence within the Greek community and threatening the multicultural society that Greek Australians and other migrants have fought to defend”.

The neo-Nazis have been given a similar reception in Canada, where the party opened a chapter last October. Despite getting the father of champion sprinter Nicolas Macrozonaris to front it, the group was quickly denounced by Greek Canadians as “a black mark”.

The culture of intolerance that has allowed racially motivated violence to flourish in Greece – with black-clad Golden Dawn members being blamed for a big rise in attacks on immigrants – had, they said, no place in a country that prides itself on liberal values.

“Their philosophy and ideology does not appeal to Greeks living here,” insisted Father Lambros Kamperidis, a Greek Orthodox priest in Montreal. “We all got scared when we saw they were giving a press conference. But it was a deplorable event and as soon as we heard their deplorable views they were condemned by community leaders and the church.”

“We are all immigrants in Canada,” added Kamperidis, referring to Golden Dawn’s tactic of tapping into anti-immigrant resentment. “The conditions that apply in Greece do not apply here, so there is no justification for the party to flourish. The really bad thing is that in opening here it gives the impression, to people who don’t know the situation, that it is supported by a lot of Greeks, which is not the case. It has hurt Greece, the Greek cause, and Greeks’ reputation more than anything else.”

Anti-racist activists outside the appeals court in Athens this month for the case involving Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty

Despite the resistance, the far-rightists have made concerted efforts to move elsewhere, with Golden Dawn supporters saying Toronto is next. But the biggest push by far to date has been in the US. As home to close to 3 million citizens of Greek heritage, America has the diaspora’s largest community. At first, cadres worked undercover, organising clothes sales and other charitable events without stating their true affiliation. Stickers and posters then began to appear around the New York suburb of Astoria before the organisation opened a branch there.

But while Greek Americans have some of the strongest ties of any community to their homeland, senior figures have vehemently denounced the organisation for not only being incongruous with Greece’s struggle against fascism, during one of Europe’s most brutal Nazi occupations, but utterly alien to their own experience as immigrants.

“These people and their principles will never be accepted in our community. Their beliefs are alien to our beliefs and way of life,” said Nikos Mouyiaris, co-founder of the Chicago-based Hellenic American Leadership Council (HALC), whose mission is to promote human rights and democratic values.

The victims of often violent persecution at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan as well as wider discrimination (in Florida in the 1920s restaurant noticeboards declared “no dogs or Greeks allowed”) Greek Americans proudly recount how, almost alone among ethnic minorities, they actively participated in the civil rights movement, their spiritual leader Archbishop Iakovos daring to march alongside Martin Luther King. “Our history as a diaspora in the US has been marked by our fight against racism,” said Mouyiaris.

Many in the diaspora believe, like Endy Zemenides who heads HALC, that Golden Dawn has deluded itself into believing it is a permanent force because of its soaring popularity on the back of the economic crisis. “The reality is that it is a fleeting by-product of failed austerity measures and the social disruption this austerity has caused,” he said.

In Greece, where Golden Dawn has begun to recruit in schools, there are fears of complacency. Drawing parallels with the 1930s Weimar period and the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ party, the historian Mark Mazower recently warned against underestimating the threat posed by a party whose use of violence was so disturbing. “Unfortunately, the Greek state does not seem to realise the urgency of the situation,” he told an audience in Athens.

After spending almost 30 years following Golden Dawn, Psarras agrees. Only weeks ago, he claimed, Michaloliakos held talks in the Greek parliament with two German neo-Nazis posing as journalists. Golden Dawn rejected the claim as “old mud”.

“It is an extremely dangerous phenomenon and do I think it will get worse? Yes I do,” Psarras said, lamenting that, with living standards plummeting, the organisation was opening offices in traditional middle-class neighbourhoods. There remained a simple fact too big to ignore: in 2009 the party was a political pariah, gaining a mere 0.29 % of the vote; today it had global ambitions.

“Ten years ago, if you had said Golden Dawn would become the third biggest force in Greece, you’d be called crazy,” said Psarras. “Now look where it is.”

Original post: Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn goes global with political ambitions

German spies accused of racism, Islamophobia

(The Local)

Germany’s security service the Verfassungsschutz is a hornet’s nest of conflict, envy, jealousy and inappropriate insults, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung, citing inside sources.

And they aren’t just innocent office jokes. Employees of the department tasked with observing militant Islamists reportedly throw around deeply offensive, Nazi-affiliated words in private of the kind which would be unthinkable in a public setting.

These range from Herrenrasse, the German for “master race” to Muselmann - originally a German word meaning “Muslim man” later used by the Nazis as a slang word for emaciated death camp inmates who had surrendered to their fate – to Ölauge, a derogatory name for “greasy” dark-eyed foreigners.

In one case currently the subject of an internal investigation, an agency employee is said to have offended co-workers in his office by positioning a doll of a Teutonic Knight with his sword pointing at a miniature mosque, wrote the paper.

The highly secretive intelligence agency declined to comment on the investigation into the doll incident, but the paper reported mixed views among internal sources.
While some insisted the incident was an isolated, one-off occurrence, others told paper the issue of racism was not being dealt with at all within the agency.

Kenan Kolat, head of the Turkish Community in Germany told the paper he believed there was “institutional racism” at work in the agency, even if every individual employee was not themselves racist. Kolat pointed to the lack of diversity among intelligence agents – and described the service as a “purely German institution.”

An agency spokesman denied this, and told the paper German intelligence officials were recruited from many different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, yet declined to give any statistics on the organisation’s ethnic make-up.

This is the latest scandal to hit the Verfassungsschutz, or Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, an organisation still reeling from accusations that agents shredded vital information relating to the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground (NSU) terror group, suspected of carrying out nine race-based murders over a ten year period.

The Local/jlb

via. AlKanz

Le Parisien reported this morning that the mosque Provins , a town about eighty kilometers from Paris, was desecrated.

Six swastikas and tags were entered in red felt on the doors and walls of the place of prayer. This is the second mosque desecrated in a week in the department of Seine-et-Marne, after the desecration of the mosque Ozoir-la-Ferriere, located about sixty miles from Provins.

A complaint was filed by the Association of Muslims in Provins, stated the Parisian.

In early February, there are four mosques were targeted in one weekend: inscriptions and swastikas openly Islamophobic Ozoir-la-Ferriere, Nazi graffiti and Star of David on two mosques in Besançon in the Doubs and envelope slices of ham in the mailbox Meximieux mosque in Ain.

At this rate, the French should launch a new game: mosqueo. Principle of the game will be to guess the mosque that will be desecrated the weekend ahead.

What French Islamophobes do best.:

Another French mosque desecrated with fascist graffiti

The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France reports that on Thursday-Friday night four swastikas along with racist slogans riddled with misspellings were sprayed on the wall of the As-Salam de Tomblaine mosque in the Lorraine region of north-east France. (The slogan “Bougnoulle de mourt” would appear to mean something like “death to wogs”.)

The CCIF notes that only a few months ago the mosque at Vandœuvre, five kilometres from Tomblaine, was also the target of a graffiti attack, although in that case the graffiti were of Kahanist rather than Nazi inspiration.

See also ICI-C-NANCY, 21 December 2012

The claim that “Islam is like Nazism,” a favorite trope amongst the Islamophobia crowd is projection on the part of the racist nationalist Sweden Democrat (SD) party.

Richard Jomshof speaks in the kind of vague and conflating of concepts language we are quite used to from anti-Islam/Muslim elements. Is he speaking about Islam? A specific trend within so-called “Islamism’? What is his definition of “Islamism”?

The resort to such glib and off-hand comparisons between Nazism and some ideology is often a sign of a lack of understanding of political movements and their histories which is the case with Jomshof as he also compares “Islamism” to “Communism.” That’s sure going to be news to the AKP, Al-Nahda and the Freedom and Justice Party who are deeply involved and supportive of the neo-Liberal economic order.

In reality such statements are intended more so for consumption by the radical sheeple base of the SD party than anyone else and to further the proselytizing fear-mongering premise that such parties are based on. (h/t: Benjamin Taghiov)

‘Islam is like Nazism’: top Sweden Democrat

(The Local)

“We’re presenting a new team today after what happened last week,” Jimmie Åkesson said at a press conference, referring to the scandal after the publication of a video showing three party members in a drunken and racist tirade from 2010.

Åkesson presented Richard Jomshof, a former high school teacher who was previously the editor in chief for the Sweden Democrat paper SD–Kuriren, as the replacement for former justice policy spokesman Kent Ekeroth who stepped down on Wednesday.

Jomshof has previously likened Islamism to Nazism in the publication, a view he showed no signs of abandoning on Thursday.

“I’ve also compared Islamism with National Socialism and Communism. I stand by that. I think it’s a completely reasonable comparison,” he told TT.

Jomshof was then asked whether he equates Islamism to the religion Islam.

Party leader Åkesson did not dismiss his colleague’s statements.

“It depends on how you make the comparison. Now we’re seeing an example in Gaza and other conflicts where extreme Islamists are involved, sometimes using the same symbols that the Nazis used,” he said.

“Such a comparison can in certain cases be relevant.”

Meanwhile, the party also announced a replacement for Erik Almqvist, who stepped down last week as the party’s economic policy spokesman. Taking his place is 44-year-old Sven-Olof Sällström.

The publication of the now-infamous video sent the party into a tailspin.

Its youth wing leader Gustav Kasselström was discharged from his duties as parliamentary secretary on Wednesday after he defended his disgraced colleagues.

Apart from the damage to their political careers, the three politicians implicated by the video may not be out the woods yet.

On Tuesday, Chief Prosecutor Mats Åhlund launched a formal investigation into whether they are guilty of racial agitation (hets mot folkgrupp), a crime punishable by up to two years in prison.

TT/The Local/og
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They still try to tell us that White Supremacy has nothing to do with it. (h/t: CriticalDragon):

Murderer Breivik gushes to German ‘Nazi killer’

RACIST mass murderer Anders Breivik has fallen for an alleged female Nazi killer and sent her a letter praising her role in a string of assassinations.

Breivik wrote to accused far-right extremist Beate Zschaepe in Germany to congratulate her terror cell which killed nine immigrant businessmen and a policewoman in a decade-long reign of terror.

Breivik, who slaughtered nearly 80 young people in Norway last year, said she should use her upcoming trial on murder and other charges “to spread right-wing propaganda!”

He also called her a “courageous heroine of national resistance” and addressed the letter to “Dear Sister Beate”.

“Reveal your political motives to the population,” said Breivik.

Details of the correspondence are revealed in this week’s edition of Der Spiegel magazine which went on sale on today in Germany.

Zschaepe was an alleged member of the National Socialist Underground, a death squad which idolised Hitler and wanted to up a “Fourth Reich” in Germany.

The cell was hunted for many years after being suspected of the string of racially-motivated attacks.

However the reign of terror came to an end after Zschaepe’s two male co-conspirators apparently killed themselves after a botched bank job.

Zschaepe then turned herself in and was arrested and charged in connection with her role in the 10 murders.

Since the NSU’s disintegration police have gathered evidence which suggests that Zschaepe was present at most murders and probably carried out several of them.

Breivik wrote a three-sided letter to Zschaepe – gushing with admiration for the NSU’s motive.

And the Norweigian is said to be “spellbound” by the woman dubbed “The Nazi Mare” in Germany.

“You did everything to stop the multiculturalism and the Islamisation of Germany,” he wrote.

But he said that the cell, which was based in the eastern German city of Zwickau, was wrong to target immigrant businessmen.

“You should have gone for political elites instead,” he advised. “But both forms of attack would damage the multicultural experiment.”

Breivik, 32, waxed lyrical about the “mission” he sees himself and Zschaepe involved in, adding: “We are both among the first drops of rain that foretell the huge, cleansing storm about to break across Europe.

“We are martyrs of the conservative revolution and should be extremely proud of our sacrifice and our troubles.”

But his words never reached his jailbird sweetheart; the letter was seized by authorities in Germany and confiscated.

Breivik is serving a minimum 21-year sentence for killing 77 people in the bombings and shootings in Oslo and Utoya that shocked the Scandinavian country.

If Zschaepe is found guilty she faces life behind bars.

Original Guest article

by Torbjörn Jerlerup

An international paper, published by counterjihad activists that believe that islam is “like the nazi ideology” and that muslims “are like nazis”?

A new paper, Dispatch International, was launched last month. The founders, and current editors, are Lars Hedegaard and Ingrid Carlqvist of the so called “Free Press Societies” of Denmark and Sweden. The founders plan to make it a regular weekly newspaper. They plan to publish the first regular issue in January next year, in several languages, including English.

The paper was presented at the “2012 International Conference for Free Speech and Human Rights in Brussels” (a european counterjihad conference where Fjordman, among others, participated) on July 9 this year:

We didn’t settle for running one Free Press Society each; since we both have a solid background as journalists we decided to start a newspaper. A good old, old-fashioned printed newspaper. We decided to call it Dispatch International because our vision is that this newspaper will become worldwide one day. But first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. Or rather – first we take Scandinavia and then we take the world! (…) We will let the facts talk, the facts that mainstream journalists hide from people.

What “facts” do they want to focus on? A closer look at the sample issue shows what they belive are “facts”: the claim that both multiculturalism and “muslims” threaten the world today.

As you can see on the frontpage, they have a picture of women dressed in Niqabs, and their kids, on it. Next to it is an article about Muslim demography. “Islam” is stronger than ever, it is claimed, and the number of “Muslims” are increasing more and more in Europe and outside Europe. Another article below the picture claims that their religion is based on a belief in a violent “warlord,” the prophet Mohammed.

If you open the paper and look at page 4, the slanders continue.

Lars Hedegaard writes about the “Truth”. The “Truth” according to Hedegaard is that Islam can be compared to Nazi ideology.

We consider Islam the most dangerous challenge to the Nordic countries and the entire West since the democracies succeeded in crushing Nazism and Fascism and beat back the third totalitarian ideology of the 20th Century, Communism.

That is why we will write a lot about Islam and Muslim immigration. Similarly, the politicians and authorities whose obligation it was to defend democracy and our Western civil liberties, but who chose to close their eyes to Islamization, are going to hear from us.

Dispatch International will be accused of hysteria and of being overly concerned with a problem that most journalists, politicians and experts consider trivial. During the 1930s the same accusation was leveled at the few newspapers that provided systematic coverage of Nazism and Nazi Germany’s aggressive plans. So we are in good company.

As if this was not enough there is an article by Paul Weston, of the nationalistic British Freedom Party, on the same page as the article by Hedegaard. In it he writes about “multiculturalism” and the “drawbacks of mass Islamic immigration.”

“Multiculturalism is a state-sanctioned tool used to encourage division to an extent that amounts to Apartheid; to destroy the Nation State; to politically and mentally disarm the native and indigenous populations and to ensure the total breakdown of civil society. Such an inevitable and anarchic situation could only then be countered by more and more rules and regulations, leading eventually to full totalitarian rule of a socialist bent – a slow-motion revolution as it were.

We can certainly expose multiculturalism as a totalitarian ideology of racial and cultural genocide. Only once this is accepted by the electoral majority can we reclaim Western Civilisation.”

The Muslims threaten the West with “racial and cultural genocide”…’Western Civilization is threatened’… That sounds like a seriuos paper, right? Or, not!

Lars Hedegaard and Ingrid Carlqvist

Who are Lars Hedegaard and Ingrid Carlqvist?

Hedegaard won international fame as an “expert” on islamization during the Danish Mohammed-cartoon affair. He created the “International Free Press Society” in 2009, modelled upon the Danish Free Press Society he founded back in 2004. It is an integrated part of the international counterjihad movement.

The irony is that the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who wants to ban the quran, is in the advisory board of the IFPS. So much for this “freedom” to publish anything. Freedom for all – except Muslims, it seems!

The other founder is Ingrid Carlqvist, a Swedish journalist.

Carlqvist and the political worldview of Breivik

Lets take a closer look at the worldview Carlqvist has. It is shows us what we can expect in the future from this new paper.

Carlqvist has a worldview which is typical of the counterjihad movement. It is a worldview similar to the view of the Norwegian terrorist Breivik, who murdered 77 people last year in Oslo and Utoya.

Breivik believes in the myth of “Eurabia,” the clam that Muslims are conspiring to occupy Western nations. According to him Europe is occupied by evil people that are “like the nazis,” that is the Muslims, and run by “Quislings” that cooperate with these new Nazis. (The term “quisling” was coined during WWII. Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian who collaborated with the Nazis.)

On his Facebook page Breivik described himself as the “Max Manus” of 2011. Max Manus was a famous resistance fighter during World War 2 who fought the Nazis and the Quislings, and murdered several Nazis during the war. Breivik compared himself to Max Manus and believed that the people he murdered were as evil as the Nazis and the Quislings in the ’40s.

The Leftist youth at Utöya were “quislings,” representatives of an occupying power, that had to be murdered, as he viewed it.

Breivik got this rhetoric from the counterjihad movement. Counterjihad likens the Muslims to the Nazis and Islam to Nazi ideology all the time.

Carlqvist shares this worldview. All of it, except perhaps, the belief in violence.

In a recent conversation with her on twitter I asked her what she meant by a tweet she made about the need to expose “dangerous ideologies.” “Do you mean that islam is a dangerous ideology?” I asked. “Yes, it is as dangerous as National Socialism, or more”, she answered.

In another exchange on facebook she stated:  In english this is: “Yes islam is dangerous, even if not all muslims are dangerous. Exactly like National Socialism is dangerous even if not all nazis are dangerous” (“Ja, islam är farlig även om inte alla muslimer är det. Precis som nazism är farligt även om inte alla nazister är det.”)

“Nazis” and “Quislings”

At a forum on Facebook called Free Press Forum, she has previously written similar things. She wrote a lot about Bruce Bawer, another European counterjihadist that Breivik admired.

Bruce published a book, The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate About Islam, 2012, that Carlqvist recommended at the forum with the words: “Bruce Bawer compares the leftists with Vidkun Quisling, he is a brave man.”

She also compared Islam to Nazi ideology at the forum and the opponents were compared to quislings.

When confronted with the fact that Breivik too descibed the leftists that he murdered as “quislings”, she said: “you reason the way you do because you are one of the quislings…you are seeking to slander those of us who are critizising the islamization, by comparing us to Breivik”.

The threat, as she views it, is not only cultural, it is racial too. Europe is treathened by immigrants that have a lower IQ, she claims. Not surprisingly she believes that they are coming from MENA, that is, that they are Muslims.

Despite her frequent rants about Muslims and IQ, Carlqvist claims that she is not a racist and that Dispatch International is not racist because “the paper is critical to islam.”

Would it cause you undue distress if a bunch of hoodlums known for their sympathies with Nazism showed up in front of your house with a mega phone? Probably.

Nazi found guilty of harassing councillor in mosque protest

The leader of a racist BNP protest has been found guilty of disturbing public order outside a former councillor’s house.

Kieren Trent pleaded not guilty to four counts of public disorder when he appeared at Milton Keynes Magistrates’ Court for his part in causing former Councillor Mike Galloway “undue distress and alarm” as he and a group of others protested outside Mr Galloway’s home in Wolverton. [See here and here.]

French government is pretty sensitive. It doesn’t like being called out when it flirts with fascists:

French cabinet walks out of parliament over Nazi claim

(Islamophobia-Watch)

The French prime minister and his cabinet have stormed out of parliament after an opposition MP accused the rightwing interior minister of flirting with Nazi ideology.

The Socialist Serge Letchimy, from Martinique, questioned the interior minister and close Sarkozy ally, Claude Guéant, over his controversial comments this weekend that “not all civilisations are of equal value”, and his assertion that some civilisations, namely France’s, are worth more than others.

Letchimy said Guéant was “day by day leading us back to these European ideologies that gave birth to concentration camps”. After a loud interruption of protests, he added: “Mr Guéant, the Nazi regime, which was so concerned about purity, was that a civilization?”

In a rare move, the entire French government stormed out of the question-time session.

The French political class has been at each other’s throats this week over the latest stance by Guéant, who was once Sarkozy’s most senior adviser and is seen as the president’s mouthpiece for rightwing views to court voters from Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front National.

Over the past year Guéant has been accused of deliberate anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric after saying the number of Muslims in France was a “problem”, linking immigrants to crime and unemployment, saying the French wanted their country to “remain French”, and that Sarkozy’s drive for military intervention in Libya was a “crusade”.

This weekend he told a meeting with students: “Contrary to the leftwing relativist ideology, for us, not all civilisations are equal. Those who defend humanity seem more advanced to us than those who deny it. Those who defend freedom, equality and brotherhood seem to us superior to those that accept tyranny, subjugation of women and social or ethnic hatred.”

Muslim groups in France sought assurances that Guéant, who is in charge of immigration and religion in the French cabinet, was not referring to Islam and French Muslims. He replied that he had not been targeting any civilisation in particular.

Sarkozy backed Guéant’s comments as “common sense” and dismissed the “ridiculous controversy”.

The French prime minister François Fillon demanded an apology from the Socialist party for the “indecent” and “shameful” Nazi analogy in parliament. The head of the ruling rightwing UMP party’s parliament group, Christian Jacob, said an analogy of this kind was a first in the history of parliament.

The Socialist Letchimy said that as the son of a slave, he refused to apologise. Jean-Marc Ayrault, head of the Socialist parliamentary group, said Guéant’s “repeated provocations” had damaged the political climate.

Some in Sarkozy’s own camp had distanced themselves from Guéant in recent days. “He makes a better minister than ethnologist,” said the former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

Guardian, 7 February 2012

Brigitte Gabriel

Right-wing Christianity’s favorite self-hating racist, Hanan Tudor, a.k.a Brigitte Gabriel has been making a killing through her anti-Islam organization “ACT! For America,” also better known as Hate! for America.

Not too long ago she was at the Cornerstone Church in Nashville, Tennessee, (yes, the same church that hosted European fascist Geert Wilders) participating in the “anti-Shariah Conference.” You can watch the video yourself here.

As you can see Gabriel is up to her usual gimmick, fear-mongering about the deadly and dire “Islamization of the USA,” which is supposedly happening right under the patriotic noses of: good, wholesome, real Americans! According to her the Muslims are being aided in this anti-American endeavor by the liberals who wish nothing more than to see America destroyed!

She says at the 6:00 minute mark about the “Liberal-Islamic axis of evil”:

They’re doing exactly what Hitler did. What did Hitler say, what did Hitler do? “Give me the children and I’ll change society in ten years.”

Really? The Hitler card? Isn’t that played out by now?

Cornerstone Church has a history of giving a platform to this sort of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim propaganda. I won’t be surprised if one of its congregants believes he/she has to take out the Muslims before they take over, or perhaps a la cultural-Christian-Templar-Knight-Terrorist Anders Breivik, take out the liberals who are facilitating the so-called “demise of the USA.”

*********************

While Brigitte Gabriel’s reputation has been severely discredited and she is unable to get the kind of access that she was accustomed to in the past she is still able to weasel her way at times into the mainstream.

Such was the case recently in an article written by Frida Ghatis for McClatchy Newspapers and which was picked up by the Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and several other papers. Ghatis’ article was titled, Truly Revolutionary: Arabs Speaking Well of Israel.

The piece is pro-Israel propaganda through-and-through and while maintaining a veneer of objectivity it degrades the successes of the Arab Spring and revolves around the not-so-hidden thesis that a real revolution in the Arab world would be one in which Arabs “speak well of Israel.” No explanation is given of why many Arabs are anti-Israel (i.e. occupation, apartheid, discrimination, war crimes, the bombing of Arab countries, etc.).

Instead the focus is: will Arabs finally love Israel and say nice things about it. All pretense to objectivity is dropped when we come to this sentence:

Pro-Israel Arabs, Muslims, and former Muslims who use their real names are usually people living safely in the West, such as Lebanon’s Brigitte Gabriel, Somalia’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Egypt’s Tawfik Hamid, or Canada’s Irshad Manji.

We have covered all of the loons mentioned above by Ghatis. If Ghatis was willing to do a basic search on Gabriel she would realize that Gabriel doesn’t even consider herself an Arab! In fact, Gabriel believes Arabs have no soul!:

The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arab world is the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil [applause]…. this is what we’re witnessing in the Arabic world, They have no SOUL!, they are dead set on killing and destruction. And in the name of something they call “Allah” which is very different from the God we believe….[applause] because our God is the God of love.

One can see why Ghatis would be so enthusiastic about Gabriel, she really speaks so “well” of Israel.