New groups were also appearing in Denmark after English Defense League leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon held the inaugural meeting of a Europe-wide network of defense leagues in Oslo recently.
Another group, Women Against Islamization, was founded in Belgium last month whose launch was addressed by Jackie Cook, the wife of BNP leader Nick Griffin.
Not surprisingly, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, posted a blog in October 2010 about how European Muslims are stigmatised by populist rhetoric. "European countries appear to face another crisis beyond budget deficits - the disintegration of human value. One symptom is the increasing expression of intolerance towards Muslims. Opinion polls in several European countries reflect fear, suspicion and negative opinions of Muslims and Islamic culture," he wrote in a powerful indictment.
It is economy not religion
In Europe--western civilization's heartland--hate movements are once again on the march, according to the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center report of June 2012. The report, titled European extremist movements, said from the UK and France, to Norway and Sweden, to Germany and Austria, to Spain and Greece, to Hungary and Poland and Ukraine and Russia, the resurgence of extremist movements is a common theme with variations.
History teaches us again and again that societies, which are oblivious to the past, are destined for disaster, the report warned and added: "A generation after Auschwitz, Hitler's aura still looms. New generations of Europeans are targeted by the siren song of extremist movements on both the right and the left that distort and deny history in the name of destructive visions of the future rooted in hatred. In today's "post-modern" Europe, the continent's oldest disease--Jew hatred--is metastasizing."
The rising tide of hate crimes across Europe during the last decade--four times as likely to target Jews as Muslims--demonstrates the inextricable connection of prejudicial beliefs and anti-Semitic behavior, the Simon Center report went on to say. "Equally disturbing are the convergence of extreme right and left around an anti-Semitic political agenda, and the internationalizing of hate movements in transnational alliances."
At the same time, a German think tank, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Forum Berlin, has warned that particularly in times of crisis, right-wing extremists and right-wing populists in many places are trying to use the fears of European citizens to promote their "cause" by providing simple answers to complex social challenges. "As a result, not only were 29 right-wing representatives elected to the European Parliament in 2009, but in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria and Eastern Europe, too, they scored in national elections with slogans of scapegoatism and exclusion."
The 2011 report titled " Right-wing extremism and right-wing populism in Europe," pointed out that
analyses of right-wing extremism and right-wing populism in different countries show that the radical right appeals to those on the losing side of current social processes. "Be it the British National Party, the Progress Party, or the Danish People's Party : the target groups always comprise people who are, in the course of economic and social processes of change, threatened by losses in terms of labor, income, prestige, access to education and leisure time. The main target groups in Western Europe are therefore people from the lower and lower middle class."
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