In Europe, It's the Old Right That's Full of Hate

By Gary Younge, The Nation. Posted December 24, 2007.

Over the past year or so the rural Italian idyll of Colle di Val d'Elsa has played host to a bitter battle for Enlightenment values. On one side, the hamlet's small Muslim community has raised a considerable amount of money to build a large mosque. Having gained the mayor's approval, the Muslims signed a declaration of cooperation with the town hall and even planted a Christmas tree at the site as a good-will gesture.

In response, other locals pelted them with sausages and dumped a severed pig's head at the site. On a wall near the site vandals daubed: "No Mosque," "Christian Hill" and "Thanks to the communists the Arabs are in our house!!!"

Such is the central dynamic in European race relations at present. It is probably not the dynamic you have heard most about. The most popular one making the rounds this side of the Atlantic involves hordes of Muslims, rabid with anti-Semitic and misogynistic views, running amok as they bomb, bully and outbreed their clueless liberal hosts in a bid to build a caliphate.

"Do you have a child back in England?" an elderly Los Angelena asked a British reporter on a recent National Review cruise.

"No," he said.

"You'd better start," she replied. "The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they'll have the whole of Europe."

Nor is it by any means the only dynamic. There are a handful of nihilistic young Muslims keen to bomb and destroy and a far larger number sufficiently disaffected that they are prepared to riot. There are also many Europeans keen to see equality and meaningful integration, defending civil liberties and opposing wars against predominantly Muslim lands.

But the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not "Islamofascism"--that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning--but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority.

For fascism--and the xenophobic, racist and nationalistic elements that are its most vile manifestations--has returned as a mainstream ideology in Europe. Its advocates not only run in elections but win them. They control local councils and sit in parliaments. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Italy, hard-right nationalist and anti-immigrant parties regularly receive more than 10 percent of the vote. In Norway it is 22 percent; in Switzerland, 29 percent. In Italy and Austria they have been in government; in Switzerland, where the anti-immigrant Swiss People's Party is the largest party, they still are.

This is not new. From Austria to Antwerp, Italy to France, fascists have been performing well at the polls for more than a decade. Nor are they shy about their bigotry. France's Jean-Marie Le Pen has described the Nazi gas chambers as a "detail of history"; Austria's Jörg Haider once thanked a group of Austrian World War II veterans, including former SS officers, for "stick[ing] to their convictions despite the greatest opposition." But the attacks of 9/11, the bombings in Spain and Britain and the riots in France gave the hard right new traction. The polarizing effects of terrorism facilitated the journey of hard-right agendas from the margins to the mainstream. Islamophobia became de rigueur. Recently German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a Christian Democrat party congress that "we must take care that mosque cupolas are not built demonstratively higher than church steeples."

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