NUMBER OF EXTREMIST ACTS RISES IN 2009 (Czech Rep.)

The police registered 265 crimes with an extremist motive in the 10.5 million Czech Republic last year, which was 0.07 percent of all crimes and 48 more than in 2008, according to a document the Chamber of Deputies defence and security committee discussed yesterday. The police cleared up 186 crimes last year, or 60 more than in 2008. A total of 293 people were prosecuted, which was about 100 more than in 2008, and courts convicted 103 people of racially motivated crimes. Deputy Interior Minister Zdenek Salivar said "the extremist scene is on the defensive" now. He said that is why rightist extremists have moderated their rhetoric. The militant wing is now trying to change the neo-Nazi label and focuses on environmental themes. Salivar said the abolition of the Workers' Party (DS) last year was a step of European importance. The party, however, practically continues its acitivities under a new name, the Workers' Party of Social Justice (DSSS). The number of neo-Nazi concerts roughly halved to 18 last year, and only one sole was held after last June's raid on rightist extremists, the report says. The concerts have been moved abroad, mainly to Poland and Slovakia, Police President Oldrich Martinu said. He said the concerts were a significant source of money for the extremist groups. The police inspection also checked six cases on suspicion of police involvement in criminal activity with an extremist subtext last year. The suspicion was not proved in three of them, another two continue to be checked and one case ended in a disciplinary punishment. A total of 24 police members were involved in the cases, the report said. It said the military police investigated ten cases, involving 12 soldiers. Salivar said everyone who seeks a job with security corps is checked for extremism now.

Prague Monitor

English Defence League members attend New York mosque protest

At least seven EDL supporters take part in demonstration after far-right group's leader  is  reportedly turned away at airport

Members of the far-right English Defence League protested in New York this weekend against plans for an Islamic cultural centre and mosque near Ground Zero.

The group's leader, who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, and at least seven other EDL supporters flew to the US to oppose the plans on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Robinson was refused entry at JFK airport, taken into custody and flown straight back to the UK, according to a report published on the anti-Islam Gates of Vienna website sourced to EDL activists travelling with him.

The rest of the delegation joined far-right leaders including Geert Wilders, the Dutch leader of the Freedom party, at the demonstration in lower Manhattan.

The contingent was pictured holding banners incorporating St George's cross, Israel's flag and the US stars and stripes, as well as the slogans "No Mosque at Ground Zero", "The more Islam, the less freedom", "No Sharia", and "No Surrender". They wore EDL T-shirts sporting the group's crusader shield logo.

Over the past 18 months in town centres across England the group has protested against the spread of Islamic institutions and in support of the armed forces. EDL demonstrators have been heard chanting racist slogans and have clashed with anti-fascist activists, and marches have been banned for fear of violence.

The decision to send protesters to America reflects the organisation's self-proclaimed "new phase of international outreach and networking", which began in April when supporters attended a Berlin demonstration in support of Wilders. The Dutchman said yesterday that New Yorkers must defend themselves against "the powers of darkness, the forces of hatred".

In June, the EDL sent delegates to speak at a "counter jihad" conference organised by the International Civil Liberties Alliance in Zurich, where they gave a presentation entitled The Anatomy of an EDL Demo.

Nick Lowles, of Searchlight, the anti-fascist monitoring organisation, said: "The EDL operates on two levels. There are the street activists such as the 120 that demonstrated in Oldham and 100 in London this weekend. But then there is the political agenda driven by a group of leaders whose ideas come from Christian fundamentalism. They are running a dual strategy and they see an international aspect to their goals where the uniting issue is anti-Islam."

The EDL is planning to join a far-right demonstration in Amsterdam on 30 October under the banner of the European Freedom Initiative. Organisations from Austria, Germany, Italy and France are also due to attend.

The Guardian

Ground Zero mosque Imam blames Sarah Palin for 'growing Islamophobia'

The Muslim cleric behind plans to build a mosque close to the Ground Zero site has blamed politicians such as Sarah Palin for fuelling a "growing Islamophobia" that led to the burning of Korans on the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks

The Reverend Terry Jones abandoned his "international burn a Koran day" in Gainesville, Florida on Saturday but there were isolated instances in Tennessee and New York of the Muslim holy book being set alight.

"What has happened is that..certain politicians decided that this project would be very useful for their political ambitions," Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf said, adding that this had prompted a "growing Islamophobia" in the US.
Imam Rauf's proposal for an Islamic Centre, containing a mosque, two blocks from the site of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, has become embroiled in controversy.

Mrs Palin was the first major national figure to get involved in what had been a localised dispute when she sent a Twitter message in July stating: "Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing."

Imam Rauf said Mrs Palin's intervention had been "disingenuous" and played a part of the issue being "hijacked by the radicals" over the summer.

In Springfield, Tennessee, the Reverend Bob Old and the Reverent Danny Allen, both evangelical pastors, burned Koran to coincide with the anniversary of the September 11th atrocities.

"It's about faith, it's about love, but you have to have the right book behind you. This is a book of hate, not a book of love," said the Rev Old as he held up a Koran.

In New York, an unidentified man ripped pages from a Koran and lit them near the proposed site of the Islamic centre. "If they can burn American flags, I can burn the Koran," he said.

Imam Rauf said that he would not have proposed his Islamic Centre had he anticipated the furore that has resulted. "I would never have done it."

But he was reluctant to consider a different site because of how this would be interpreted by Islamic extremists. "My major concern with moving it is that the headline in the Muslim world will be Islam is under attack in America.

This will strengthen the radicals in the Muslim world, help their recruitment, this will put our people -- our soldiers, our troops, our embassies, our citizens -- under attack in the Muslim world and we have expanded and given and fuelled terrorism."

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has given his backing to the mosque proposal and President Barack Obama intervened to remind critics that religious freedoms in America allow anyone to open a holy place. But several senior Democrats including Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, publicly distanced themselves from the presidents position.

Official commemorations for the attacks on the New York's Twin Towers and the Pentagon were solemn affairs but took place against a backdrop of fierce debate about the relationship between Islam and terrorism.

"As Americans we are not – and never will be – at war with Islam," said Mr Obama. "It was not a religion that attacked us that September day – it was al-Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion."

The Telegraph

Swedish PM candidates to keep far-right at bay

Sweden's two main prime minister candidates agreed in a debate aired Sunday, a week before elections, that they would not work with the increasingly popular far-right Sweden Democrats.

"We won't touch them (the Sweden Democrats) with pliers," Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt vowed on behalf of his four-party centre-right coalition during a long and heated debate broadcast live on Swedish public television.

Mona Sahlin, who is vying for his job at the front of the so-called red-green opposition coalition made up of her Social Democrats, the Greens and the formerly communist Left Party, agreed.

"The Sweden Democrats ... always make the immigrants the culprits, either for taking jobs or for not taking jobs. Such a party can only be met with a crystal clear message: that we will not touch them, not cooperate with them," she said.

There comments came as a Novus Opinion tally of five different polls published Sunday by Swedish public radio handed 4.6 percent of voter intentions to the far-right anti-immigrant party, which would be enough to secure them a place in parliament for the first time.

Observers have pointed out that if neither of the main political blocs, which been neck-and-neck in polls for months, manage to secure more than 50 percent of the vote on September 19, the Sweden Democrats could easily become the kingmaker in the parliament.

Reinfeldt's Moderate Party and its coalition members, the Liberal, Centre and Christian Democrat parties, have in recent polls taken a lead and in Sunday's tally scored 50 percent of voter intention, compared to 43.6 percent for the leftwing opposition.

The prime minister has in recent weeks met criticism for saying he plans to hold onto his job if his coalition wins most votes, even if it means creating a minority government, with critics saying he then could be open to pressure from the far-right.

On Sunday however, he stressed that if his bloc does not secure a majority, it will need to seek "a broader parliamentary solution," most likely looking to the Green Party for support.

Sahlin meanwhile reiterated in Sunday's debate that she will not create a minority government which could be open to influence by the Sweden Democrats, insisting that "Sweden needs a majority government."

She has in recent weeks said she may try to woo over the Centre and Liberal parties if the opposition wins most votes but not a clear majority, but both of those parties have said they would decline such an offer.


Swedish Wire

Marine le Pen: Mightier than her père? (France)

Daughter of the Right lays out for John Lichfield the future course of a party she says was 'misunderstood'

Marine Le Pen was late back from lunch. This is a common condition among French politicians but very  unusual for Marine Le Pen. She is known for being always on time and for being polite, charming and, unlike her father, difficult to dislike. She arrived "only" 20 minutes late. And she wanted the readers of The Independent to know that they had been misinformed for years about the National Front, which is, she says, not a racist party, or a xenophobic party, not even a far-right party but a "patriotic party" of neither left nor right.

If she takes over its leadership from her father in January (which she almost certainly will), she intends to "sweep away the caricatures" and transform the National Front from a party of protest into a "party of government". She said: "To exercise power is the objective of all politicians. The National Front is still a young party. We should now be ready to take a step upwards and have no fear of assuming responsibility. If the party does not want to win, I don't want to lead them. That wouldn't interest me. I'm not ready to settle for a permanent posture of complaint."
When she entered politics, Jean-Marie Le Pen's youngest daughter was a large and somewhat lumbering woman. She looked like Stephen Fry in drag. Ten years later, as she prepares to replace her father, 42-year-old Marine is slender, elegant and tanned. She wears a grey jacket, a grey blouse, tight blue jeans and high heels. Her supporters hope – and her enemies inside and outside the party fear – that she will achieve an equally startling transformation (or, in French, un re-looking radical) of the National Front.

Alain Duhamel, France's shrewdest political commentator, says: "Marine is just as demagogic as her father and even more dangerous. Jean-Marie Le Pen wanted only to be a player, to be noticed, to show off. Marine Le Pen wants to win and to rule."

Her 82-year-old father will retire as president of the National Front in January. A party conference will choose his successor from a short-list of two. The candidates are his bookish, grey, unreconstructed, hard-line deputy, Bruno Gollnisch, 60, and the youngest of his three, daughters, Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, always known as "Marine". Jean-Marie, the founder and colossus of the party, has already made it known that he thinks that Marine will, and should, win.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who won the French Presidency in 2007 partly by reclaiming votes from the NF, is worried. His decision in July to make a theatrical link between foreigners and crime by declaring war on Roma immigrants from eastern Europe is admitted in the Elysée Palace to be part of an "anti-Marine" strategy.

But is her drive to "sweep away misconceptions" about theNF not, de facto, an attack on her dear old dad? She says that the media "demonised" the NF. But what about Jean-Marie Le Pen's own extremist statements over the years? (Too many black players in the France football team; immigration is a Jewish-led conspiracy to destroy France.)

That was then, she says. This is now. "It's true that, 30 years ago, Jean-Marie Le Pen maybe used a few provocative remarks to make himself heard when the political and media classes would give no space to our ideas. There is no need to use such methods today because, in so many areas, the facts have proved that the National Front was right. On uncontrolled immigration. On the EU. On globalisation. On ultra-capitalism. Even President Sarkozy seems to agree with us on a number of subjects. We are now in a position where we can offer solutions, not just try to convince people that we have identified the right problems. That changes everything."

Marine Le Pen believes that not only in France, but all across Europe, the time is right for a less histrionic, more pragmatic form of populist nationalism. This would be anti-immigration but "not racist"; anti-EU but not anti-European; anti-globalisation but not anti-market. Every country is different, she says (as a good nationalist should) but the rise of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Gianfranco Fini in Italy and a middle class, populist right in Flanders, all point in the same direction.

"In many European countries, there is a growing tide of anxiety driven by uncontrolled immigration, globalisation and the rules of the EU," she says. "People feel pushed around, threatened with losing their identity, their traditions and their jobs."

In her quest to modernise, and "de-demonise" the Front, she says wants to "abolish a number of ambiguities linked to our past". What does she mean? "I will give you an example. People say we are a free-market party. Yes, we believe in free-enterprise but we are not an ultra-capitalist party. We believe in frontiers. We also believe that the state should have a strategic role in the economy. We fight against 'ultra-liberalism', which we consider to be a totalitarian system which insists on the free movement of people, goods and capital, something we reject." In American terms, she says, the NF, is not a right-wing party. It is certainly much less right wing, she says, than the Tea Party movement, which distrusts all government and hates all taxes.
OK, d'accord, lets consider another "ambiguity". Marine Le Pen insists that she is not a racist, that France is "not a racist country" and that the NF was "never a racist party". Why then, I asked, did she tell her first campaign meeting in the Var in southern France that all the other parties wanted to "Islamise" France and that they had plans to introduce "sharia law" into the country? How could a country which is about to ban the burka be said to be preparing to live under sharia law? In any case, France now has large black, brown and Islamic communities. Many of them are French citizens, born in France. Like it or not, multi-culturalism is a fact of French life.

Marine became a little heated for the first time. "We are are in a trial of strength between Islam and the secular values of the French republic, an insidious trial of strength and one that we are losing," she said. How so? The signs are all around us, she said. Her evidence scarcely seems overwhelming.

Several swimming pools have allowed women's-only times for Muslim bathers; 22 Quick burger restaurants (out of many hundreds) now sell only halal meat; pork has been taken off the menu in some schools, and a few streets are occasionally blocked to allow Muslims to pray in the open air.

"You say to me that a multi-cultural country can live in peace," she said. "I don't think that can ever happen. Anywhere that communities with different cultures have tried to live together in the same territory, we have had tragedies, we have had conflicts."

Marine is distrusted by many within the NF, a disparate coalition of mutually suspicious tribes from die-hard patriots, to Catholic fundamentalists, to pagan nature-worshippers. Her support for abortion and the rights of homosexuals angers social conservatives. Her arguments for the "secular values" of the French Republic irritate the fundamentalist Catholics.

Marine says she knows that she is not to everyone's taste in the party but she does not care. "That's the beauty of this [internal] election," she said. "It gives me the chance to be very clear about what I stand for. I don't want to seduce the National Front. I want to convince it. For nine years now I have been defending our values to my own music. Lots of factors, the polls, the anxiety within [President Sarkozy's centre-right party] the UMP [Union pour un Mouvement Populaure] suggest that I am the person best placed to take the Front's ideas as far as they can be taken."

On the door of her office are photographs of three beautiful children. She says, proudly, that she had them "all in one year", 11-year-old twins and a 12-year-old daughter, Jehanne, the original spelling for Joan of Arc. Marine has twice been married and twice divorced. Her parents divorced, spectacularly, when she was 19. She is a lawyer, a Euro MP and a town councillor in Hénin-Beaumont, near Lille in northern France.

A recent poll in the Nouvel Observateur magazine suggested that Marine would come third with 13 per cent of the vote in the first round of a presidential election. This is not an extraordinary breakthrough but it is better (by five points) than her father was polling two years before he took 17 per cent of the vote in the 2002 presidential election and reached the two-candidate run-off.

Marine says that a spectre is haunting Mr Sarkozy's UMP. What really worries them, she says, is that she will come ahead of Mr Sarkozy in 2012 and go into the second round against a candidate of the left. "In 2002, all the left-wing voters turned out to vote for Chirac in the second round and against my father. Faced with the same choice, would the great majority of UMP voters cast ballots for the left and not for me? I don't think they would. And many people in the UMP don't think they would."

During an hour of polite probing and pushing, Marine remained resolutely on-message. Only occasionally did she stray beyond what might have been repeated by a Conservative Party right-winger or an editorial in the Daily Mail.

But she did make one startling declaration. Seventy years ago, she said, she would have been on the side of Charles de Gaulle and les résistants". She would not have been on the side of Marshal Philippe Pétain and Vichy. This may seem like a banal statement. In the context of the tribal, history-soaked politics of France – and especially of the National Front – it is a striking declaration of who Marine Le Pen thinks she is. Or at least who she wants people to think she is.

Vichy-sympathisers, people who believe that Marshal Petain was a hero, not a Nazi collaborator, in 1940-44, are one of the many tribes of the NF. Jean-Marie Le Pen has always been morbidly obsessed by the Second World War. (The gas ovens, he famously said, were only a "detail" of history, and the occupying Germans behaved "on the whole correctly" in France.)

As far as I know, no one has ever publicly asked Marine a question about the war. So I asked her. Twice. She did not specifically repudiate Marshal Petain as a traitor but she did eventually say: "Many French people resisted. They were right to do so. They were only a minority. That doesn't mean that all the rest were collaborators. Most were neither. But my instinct would have been to be on the side of the Resistance."

So there it is. Marine Le Pen would have been wearing a beret and a trench-coat and planting bombs under German troop trains in 1940-44. Her statement will anger many Vichy sentimentalists within the NF Front. It remains to be seen, when (not if) she is elected, whether she can hold the disparate clans of the NF together.

Marine believes that she can put the nationalist-patriotic, anti-European, anti-immigration, anti-globalisation argument in ways that appeal to previously moderate voters of both the right and left. She believes that the populist far right (a term she rejects) can finally be on the right side of history. With President Sarkozy floundering and the French centre-left still muddled, in 2012 she could be a very dangerous opponent indeed.

The Independant