Even for one of Europe's quirkier capitals, it was a bizarre spectacle -- a far-right politician who has questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers noshing on salmon pate at a bar mitzvah and tapping his foot to wildly pulsating Hasidic music.
"The rabbi is a good friend of mine," John Gudenus said of his host. "Why, we've even had him over to the house!"
They make strange bedfellows from opposite fringes -- ultra-rightists and ultra-Orthodox Jews, joined in an alliance for diverging ends.
PHOTO: AP
Brooklyn-born Moishe Arye Friedman says he's chief rabbi for hundreds of anti-Zionist orthodox Jews in Vienna. He wants formal state recognition of his religious community, and thinks the rightists can help. Gudenus and his cohorts say they have no hidden agenda in supporting Friedman's cause -- but they may have something to gain from it.
"For people like this, being seen with an orthodox Jew is an attempt to gain some legitimacy," says Wolfgang Neugebauer, the recently retired head of the publicly funded office that tracks neo-Nazi trends in Austria. "They try to create an `alibi Jew' to escape accusations of anti-Semitism."
The rightists sorely need positive publicity.
Their Freedom Party, which shocked Europe in 1999 by winning enough election votes to merit a place in government, is on the ropes after its less extreme wing bolted to form its own party this year.
Even as Austria struggles to come to grips with the country's part in the Holocaust during the time it was annexed to Hitler's Third Reich, the hard-liners continue to provoke uproar by sounding like apologists for the Nazis.
Just last month, Gudenus declared anew that whether the gas chambers existed should be "seriously debated."
Last week he amended that view to "there were gas chambers, though not in the Third Reich but in Poland."
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS