FEARS OF FAR-RIGHT RISE IN CRISIS-HIT GREECE

They descended by the hundreds – black-shirted, bat-wielding youths chasing down dark-skinned immigrants through the streets of Athens and beating them senseless in an unprecedented show of force by Greece’s far-right extremists. In Greece, alarm is rising that the twin crises of financial meltdown and soaring illegal immigration are creating the conditions for a right-wing rise – and the Norway massacre drove authorities to beef up security on Monday. The move comes amid spiraling social unrest that has unleashed waves of rioting and vigilante thuggery on the streets of Athens. The U.N.’s refugee agency warns that some Athens neighborhoods have become zones where “fascist groups have established an odd lawless regime.” Greek police on Monday said they have increased security checks at Muslim prayer houses and other immigrant sites in response to the Norway shooting rampage that claimed 77 lives. “There has been an increase in monitoring at these sites since the events occurred in Norway,” said police spokesman Thanassis Kokkalakis. Greece’s fears are shared across Europe. Last week, EU counter terror officials held an emergency meeting in Brussels on ways to combat right-wing violence and rising Islamophobia, warning of a “major risk” of Norway copycats. The massacre by Anders Behring Breivik prompted continent-wide soul-searching about whether authorities have neglected the threat of right-wing extremists as they focus on jihadist terror.

Greece, however, may be particularly worrisome because of the intersection of extreme economic distress and rampant illegal immigration, which can create fertile ground for the rise of rightist movements. Immigrant scapegoating has been rife here as unemployment balloons amid economic catastrophe. Even as Greece flounders under mountains of debt, illegal immigrants have been streaming into the country across the Turkish border – turning Greece into the migrant world’s gateway to Europe. Last year, Greece accounted for 90 per cent of the bloc’s detected illegal border crossings, compared to 75 per cent in 2009. The UNHCR and Muslim groups say hate crimes have risen sharply, although police do not have hard numbers. The xenophobic rage exploded in May, when youths rampaged through a heavily immigrant neighborhood in broad daylight, knifing and beating foreigners. The attacks left at least 25 people hospitalized with stab wounds or severe beatings. Athens has since suffered a spate of hate attacks by far-rightists. Last November, the leader of a neo-Nazi group won a seat on Athens’ city council, with an unprecedented 5.3 per cent of the vote. The UNHCR warns of daily attacks by fascist groups in central Athens. “There has been a dangerous escalation in phenomena of racist violence targeting indiscriminately aliens, based solely on their skin color or country of origin,” the UNHCR wrote in a June report. “In certain areas of Athens, cruel and criminal attacks are nearly a daily phenomenon staged by fascist groups that have established an odd lawless regime.”

Immigrants testify to the growing atmosphere of hostility.
“I receive threats all the time,” Naim Elgandour, the Egyptian-born head of the Muslim Association of Greece, said in an interview. “Things have gotten much worse lately. It’s an alarm bell from the rest for Europe,” he said. “There may be 5,000 hardcore extremists in Athens, they are gaining sympathy and tolerance by the day.”
Mr. Elgandour said at least 10 makeshift mosques – basements and coffee shops converted by immigrants to use as prayer sites – have been damaged in firebomb and vandalism attacks in the past year. Under the strain of fast-growing unemployment and new immigrant arrivals, once middle-class neighborhoods north of the centre are turning into a rightist-ridden slums. Police with machine guns guard intersections, white brothel lights line narrow back streets, and young men from violent far-right groups sit casually in squares, sipping cans of beer and hoping to intimidate immigrants. Police spokesman Mr. Kokkalakis said violence by far-right groups has seen “periodical increases” but lacked numbers to point to a trend. But he said most cases of violence that appeared to have a “racial component” in Athens turned out to be the result of rivalry between criminal gangs. Analysts argue that once-marginalized extremist groups are gaining a foothold in mainstream society for the first time, filling a perceived gap in law enforcement in crime-ridden neighborhoods, and benefiting from a surge in popular anger against the political establishment.

Since winning a seat on Athens City Council, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, head of the violent far-right group Golden Dawn, has tailored his recent rhetoric to the financial crisis. “We are living in an enslaved country, financially and nationally,” Mr. Michaloliakos, a 54-year-old mathematician, told supporters last month, giving a speech under a statue of Alexander the Great. “We have a bankrupt economy and the thieving politicians responsible go unpunished,” he said. “How long do they think they can keep lying and fooling the Greek people? Whether they like it or not, the hour of Golden Dawn and nationalist revolution is coming.” Aristotle Kallis, a professor of modern history at Lancaster University in Britain, studies European fascism. He argued that Greek extremists are losing the stigma of being associated with the 1967-74 far-right dictatorship and becoming more similar other European groups – sharing ideas and methods on the Internet. “Since the 1990s, Greek nationalism has mutated quite substantially,” Mr. Kallis wrote in an email to the AP, warning of a broader European rise in bigotry. “We are ... becoming complacent about a wider, deep and dangerous prejudice against immigrants that is spreading well beyond the constituency of the conventional far-right.”

The Associated press

SARKOZY UNDER FIRE AS ROMA CRACKDOWN FAILS (France)

A year ago Nicolas Sarkozy launched a crackdown on Roma gypsies moving to France from Eastern Europe. Now the French President finds himself under fire from all sides for moving towards the authoritarian right while achieving very little. Immigrant support groups estimate there are now 15,000 Roma in France, the same as a year ago, even though three-quarters of their illegal settlements have been bulldozed by police, pushing the Roma onto the streets or into more makeshift encampments. Many of the 9,000 who were paid €300 to go home or were expelled by authorities last year have returned. Several other draconian announcements that Mr Sarkozy made in a speech in Grenoble a year ago in which he explicitly linked immigration and crime have been quietly dropped or deemed unconstitutional. He has recently adopted a kinder, gentler persona in an attempt to recapture the centre ground before next spring's presidential elections. The Elysée has therefore made little of the anniversary of the Grenoble speech. Not so his opponents on the centre left and far right.

François Hollande, front-runner to win the Socialist party presidential nomination in October, spoke of a "striking disparity between [Sarkozy's] verbal provocation" last summer and the "lack of concrete action". National Front leader Marine Le Pen called on the President "make a formal apology to the French people" for making a tough-sounding speech but "not keeping a single promise". This is not strictly true. President Sarkozy promised in Grenoble to "end illegal Roma encampments". Police and gendarmes cleared more than 70 per cent of such camps in the next six months. He also vowed to act against Roma who broke EU rules limiting their emigration to France and other western European countries. In doing so, the President drew criticism from the Vatican and European Commission. He was accused of breaking EU laws by singling out an ethnic group for repression. However, recent official figures confirm the crackdown was more rhetorical than real.

A little more than 9,000 Roma were expelled or paid to leave France in 2010. Almost exactly the same number were forced or paid to leave in 2009 but with far less fanfare. As some politicians and social workers said at the time, there was little to stop the Roma returning. Ginel, 42, a Roma living in a camp in Aubervilliers just north of Paris, was one of those who accepted the €300 bounty to go back to Romania."I went to visit my family and then got the bus back," he told the French news agency Agence France-Presse. "We still hope to find a better life here in France." Police figures suggest the crackdown has also been counter-productive, with the Roma becoming more marginalised than ever. The number of Paris crimes – from pick-pocketing to illegal begging – attributed to "Romanian citizens" rose 72 per cent in the first half of this year. However, 12 months and much controversy later, there remain almost exactly the same number.

The Independent

Nazi gathering: EU keeps silence

Russia has urged NATO and the European Union to come up with an assessment of the recent Nazi gathering in Estonia. A regular meeting of Estonian Waffen SS veterans took place in Sinimae in northeast Estonia on July 30. For several months in 1944, Sinimae was the scene of fierce fighting between the 20th Estonian SS division and the advancing Soviet troops. The losses on both sides totaled 200,000.

In a special statement on the issue, the Russian Foreign Ministry expressed regret that despite public protests in Estonia and an international outcry the Estonian government had once again sanctioned the gathering of those responsible for mass killings and atrocities in Nazi occupied lands. The Estonian government’s tacit approval of such meetings requires a political and legal assessment from Estonia’s partners in the European Union and NATO and from relevant international bodies, the ministry said. What is particularly alarming is that actions glorifying Nazi collaborators, spreading neo-Nazi, xenophobic and racist ideas among youth and calling for a revision of the results of the Second World War have become systemic.

Maxim Mishchenko, a Russian MP and leader of the Young Russia movement, gives his view:

"What happened in the Estonian town of Sinimae on July 30 is a big international scandal. Because, if we look back at history, we’ll see what the 20th Estonian SS division was carrying out punitive operations. During the war, there was a concentration camp, the largest in Estonia, at Kluga not far from Sinimae, where, historians say, between 7,500 and 8,500 Jews were killed. Jews were brought there from all over Estonia and from neighboring territories. By allowing Nazi gatherings, the Estonian authorities throw down a challenge not just to Russia but to the entire international community. This is nothing more than an attempt to reanimate fascism."

Another pro-Nazi youth event is set to begin in Estonia on August 3. Called “Erna March”, this three-day military-sports game is actually aimed at glorifying the feat of Erna, a subversive group of Hitler’s Abwehr intelligence service, which operated in the rear of the Soviet army in 1941. The Erna game is further proof of the dangerous tendency, the Russian Foreign Ministry warns.

Without a proper rebuke, Nazi propaganda can generate ideological twists in people’s minds, resulting in such tragedies as the Breivik case in Norway. The 32-year-old Norwegian Anders Breivik, who shot dead dozens of teenagers in cold blood at a youth camp on the Utoeya Island not far from Oslo, frequented Europe’s largest neo-Nazi web site.

Many international organizations, among them NCSJ, a prominent Jewish human rights watchdog in United States, have strongly condemned Estonian Nazi gatherings as insulting to the memory of the victims of fascism and propagating neo-Nazism.

The Voice of Russia

BNP chief’s Hitler salute to Breivik heroine (UK)

Twisted BNP chief Chris Hurst gives a Nazi salute at a fascist gig by the singer who inspired massacre monster Anders Breivik.

Hurst, the BNP's London Regional Secretary, cried "Sieg heil" as pop girl Saga sang the Norwegian fiend's favourite songs at a rally in Hungary.

He also spouted racist bile to an undercover Sun team who infiltrated the hate-filled festival, attended by thousands of neo-Nazis from across Europe.

Hurst said: "It's good to fight back - but not by killing young white people."

The warped 22-year-old reckoned the victims were needed to "breed" to increase the white population.

And blaming immigration for Breivik's shocking slaughter, he added: "Isolated incidents like that are going to happen more and more as the problem gets worse."

Hurst was talking to an undercover Sun team before a concert by far-right Swedish singer Saga, whose horrific racist lyrics inspired Breivik.

During the two-hour gig - billed as a highlight of a fascist rally in Hungary - he repeatedly gave the Nazi stiff-arm salute and shouted, "Sieg heil."

And he sang along with Saga, who urges followers to rise up in the name of Aryan supremacy, as she signed off with a cover of an anthem, Tomorrow Belongs To Me, by neo-Nazi English band Skrewdriver.

It ends: "Oh Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs to me."

Saga performed brazenly even though Breivik's 77 victims in a bomb and shooting atrocity are still being buried.


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The Sun