The Freedom Party and Austria’s Jewish Community

The Freedom Party (FP) has for a long time been the pariah of Austrian politics, but that time is over. In the last presidential election their candidate Norbert Hofer almost won with 49.7 percent of the vote, which was the best result that the party had ever had in its history. Due to “possible” fraud, the election had to be repeated, and with 46.2 percent the result was almost the same.

In the next parliamentary election in October there is a lot at stake. The Freedom Party could become the strongest faction. But maybe the stupid normies will believe the lying cuckservatives, who are at the moment are announcing they will do everything the FP demanded for years (but won’t actually do it). Even the socialists are trying to establish their Minister of Defence as a “strong man,” who actually wants to defend the borders. The big question, of course, is what is stopping the government from doing this right now?

However, the important difference at this election is that both the Socialists and the cuckservative Austrian People’s Party are openly discussing the forming of a coalition with the FP. This is a transformative metapolitical change! The cordon sanitaire has been broken.

A while ago the FP announced that it considers itself now to be “the new center.” A big part of this strategy is to do everything to become more “respectable,” i.e., to tone down its rhetoric to the tamest way possible level and to get rid of representatives considered too provocative. This politically correct charm offensive also includes grovelling before Jewish institutions in an almost embarrassing manner. The obligatory pilgrimage to Israel is now a standard procedure for party bigwigs. The FP eagerly professes that it is “not anti-Semitic” at every opportunity and even has Jewish officials within its ranks.

The result of these efforts is not exactly exhilarating. The “Vienna Israelite Community” (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, IKG) is the largest Jewish organisation in Austria, and has around 7,000 members. Austria has a population of 8.7M, so the IKG represents about 0.08% of Austrian citizens. The usually wide media coverage of the IKG’s opinions is highly disproportionate with this figure. The chairman of the IKG, Oskar Deutsch, appears often on the news and comments regularly on domestic political issues. It’s no surprise that the IKG always stands on the far left and sees the FP as its enemy. It does not look like the FP’s charm offensive is going to change that anytime soon.

In a recent interview with the Austrian daily Kurier, Mr. Deutsch was asked if he will support a specific party in the upcoming election battle. He answered that “you can vote for every party, but not for the FP.”

The main topic of the interview was the rise of hatred against Jews due to massive Islamic immigration. Mr. Deutsch expressed his fear that the life of Jews in Europe could therefore become very unpleasant. Thus “every refugee should visit Mauthausen [an Austrian concentration camp memorial] to see where antisemitism leads to.”

I suspect that the transfer of White guilt to middle eastern “refugees” is not a realistic strategy. Interestingly, Mr. Deutsch classifies the condemnation of the activities of George Soros by the Hungarian government as “anti-Semitic,” although Mr. Orban did not criticize Mr. Soros simply because he is a Jew, but because of his furtherance of immigration and multiculturalism. So what does Mr. Deutsch want now? If he wants the Jews to live in peace, without the fear of Islamic attacks, he has to support the right. If he continues to support the left and its championing of Muslim immigration, it will worsen the situation of Jews in Europe. There is no third way.

As the election date gets closer the usual smear campaigns of the Leftist media are beginning. The first target of this planned outrage was Johannes Hübner, who is an educated and articulate man and a long-serving member of parliament of the Freedom Party. Last year he was giving a speech at a right-wing conference. As luck would have it, witnesses have now appeared who say that they heard Mr. Hübner making an “anti-Semitic joke,” among other things.

What was the substance of this? It seems that Hübner referred to the Jewish legal philosopher Hans Kelsen in his speech. Kelsen is celebrated here as “the father of the Austrian constitution,” but was a leftist and a radical positivist. Hübner repeated a historic joke that Kelsen’s contemporaries made about him, saying that the well-known Jewish family name “Kohn” would fit him better.

Why is it “anti-Semitic” to identify someone as a Jew? Is it inconceivable that Kelsen’s Jewish identity influenced his opinions? Are we supposed to believe that Mr. Deutsch’s Jewish identity and sense of Jewish interests are irrelevant to his political opinions? Imagine the same situation but with different ethnic groups involved. For example, think about a prominent American jurist with the name “Miller” and a German mother. If someone would say that the attitude of this man is very German and that “Müller” would therefore be a better name for him, absolutely nobody would care. No one would freak out and cry about “anti-Germanism.” But such an example already exists in Donald “Drumpf” the blatant Germanization of the sitting US President’s name.

Mr. Hübner is also accused of having made a statement that suggests that there are a lot of Jews in Austrian freemasonry—a view that is considered to be an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.” Are there really a disproportionate number of Jews in Austrian freemasonry? I do not know, but if this is true, it is not “anti-Semitic” to say so, but a mere statement of fact. If it is not true, it is only an insult if you think that freemasonry is a bad thing.

The former chairmen of the IKG Ariel Muzicant, the predecessor of Mr. Deutsch, has been the president of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith, that is organized in a similar way to freemasonry but claims not to be the same. However, once again imagine the same situation with different ethnic groups involved. If someone were to say that there are “more Protestants than Catholics in American freemasonry” would anybody say that this is “anti-Protestant”?

In a statement the IKG said that Mr. Hübner is “a shame for the Austrian parliament and unbearable as a member of parliament.” Mr. Deutsch also proclaimed, “Now is the moment of truth for the FP, when it can show how serious they take their announcement to have nothing to do with antisemitism.”

At first, the Freedom Party declared that they would not take this obvious smear campaign so seriously. But this was quickly followed by Hübner promising to mind his words more carefully and then declaring that he would not run for office in this election. I leave it to the reader to learn something from this story.