Same old scapegoat

It gives me no pleasure to learn of the rise of far right parties in Austria, even if they oppose mosque building. Nigel Jones comments in The Times:

By and large the Germans have faced up to and faced down their Nazi past. The Austrians have not, hence why, unlike Germans, a third of them are willing to vote for xenophobic parties.

Until this decade, Austrian schools continued to teach that the country was “Hitler's first victim”, rather than his earliest collaborator. The 1938 newsreel films showing the delirious Viennese crowds welcoming Hitler back give the lie to that particular piece of special pleading. As well as Hitler, many of the worst Nazi war criminals - including two of those hanged at Nuremberg, the SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, overlord of the occupied Netherlands - were Austrians; as was Otto Skorzeny, reputed leader of the postwar Odessa organisation of former SS men.

The Times carries another disturbing report:

A Muslim cemetery in Austria was desecrated in the same weekend that elections established the far-Right as the largest political bloc in the country.

More than 90 graves were severely damaged at the cemetery in Traun, near Linz, in what police believe was an organised action of far-Right extremists.

According to a Linz police spokesman, the incident happened between Friday night and Monday morning. The offenders have sprayed Jewish symbols such as the Star of David over some of the graves, but police believe that it was a bid to distract attention from far-Right offenders.

The descration of Muslim cemeteries is a despicable act in itself. To do so with Jewish symbols compounds the crime. I suspect that Jewish symbols would not have been chosen but for a belief that enough Austrians will be ready to blame the Jews.

BNP supporters take note: opposition to Muslims is not enough. Not if it is being used as a tool of racism - not the manufactured racism of "Islamophobia" but the real racism of Jew-hatred.