Australian Jews boycott Holocaust event over far-Right

VIENNA: Austria’s main Jewish body (IKG) will boycott a parliamentary Holocaust commemoration event because of the rise of the far-right Freedom Party which entered government last month, its chief said yesterday.

The Freedom Party, junior coalition partner to Sebastian Kurz’s conservatives, was founded by former Nazis and has repeatedly excluded members in Nazi scandals. It says it has left its Nazi past behind.

Kurz has vowed to focus on fighting anti-Semitism after Israel said it would not have direct contact with Freedom Party officials although the Foreign, Interior and Defence Ministers all entered cabinet on the far-right ticket. “We do not want anything to do with such people and we do not want to commemorate the people who died in the Shoah (Nazi holocaust) with such people,” Oskar Deutsch said.

“One should think about what kind of people are sitting in a government and what kind of people get voted into a parliament.”

The Freedom Party gained third place with 26% of votes in parliamentary elections in October.

The conservative president of parliament, Wolfgang Sobotka, said he could understand the IKG’s behaviour but also felt it was “a pity that some people are not coming”. Earlier this month, Interior Minister Herbert Kickl of the Freedom Party said asylum seekers should be “concentrated” in special centres to help the authorities process their applications swiftly.

For many obeservers, Kickl’s wording evoked Nazi-era concentration camps, where they held and killed millions of Jews, political dissenters, disabled people, Roma and Sinti during World War II. Nazi Germany annexed Austria, where Adolf Hitler was born, in 1938.

This week, the Freedom Party’s top candidate in elections in the province of Lower Austria, Udo Landbauer, suspended his membership in a student fraternity he helped lead when it emerged the group distributed song books with Nazi content.

Landbauer said the judiciary had to deal with the case, but added that the book in question had been produced when he was 11 years old, meaning he could not be held responsible for it.

“If you read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, for example, you also cannot say you did not know about it,” Deutsch said of Landbauer, calling for his resignation.

Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen said he was stunned about the Nazi songs in the publication and that all members of the fraternity must have known about them.