Austria far right leader hurt by "new Jews" comment

[pampango]

Head of Austrian Freedom Party FPOe Strache delivers a speech during the party's new year's gathering in Salzburg

The leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party is taking a public relations beating after refusing to apologize for likening anti-fascist protesters to a Nazi mob and his supporters to Jews. Heinz-Christian Strache's comment that "We are the new Jews" to an undercover journalist at a Vienna ball that critics say draws right-wing extremists has caused uproar and triggered at least a temporary setback for his resurgent euroskeptic party.

Strache has insisted he was only trying to express sympathy for Jews persecuted by the Nazis by describing what ball guests felt when running a tumultuous gauntlet of protesters shouting and spitting at them in an atmosphere of "mass psychosis." Instead, his remarks reawakened images of the FPO as a party of the extreme right, a sensitive point in a country annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938 and still uneasy with its wartime past.

It is an image that Strache had sought - mostly successfully - to temper while playing up Austria-first themes. Freedom's bashing of euro zone bailouts has played well to Austrian voters ahead of parliamentary elections due by next year, boosting its chances for a return to power.

European leaders are worried that Freedom's populism could see the Alpine nation of 8.4 million follow the path of Finland, where an anti-euro party (the True Finns) held up a bailout package for Greece.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Translated: We're being unfairly and unjustly discriminated against as bigots.

[COLGATE4]

2. People tend to forget

that some of the worst Nazis were Austrian, starting with Hitler himself. The same old tune - antisemitism is alive and well.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. Isn't it funny how anti-Semites love to co-opt anti-Semitism for themselves?

They either claim they are "the new Jews" or diminish the effects of anti-Semitism all together and spend their time complaining about those confronting anti-Semitism and conflating same persons with "wolf-criers."