Anti-semitism rears its head again

The death of Austria's far-right politician Jorg Haider in a car crash on Saturday draws attention to an ugly truth about modern politics - the new anti-semitism sinking its roots in Europe.

Haider liked to present himself as a man of the people - expressing simple Austrian thoughts about too many immigrants, too much Europe, too much political correctness.

But underneath these standard right-wing tropes - shared by the BNP, UKIP, and populist politicians of the left and right elsewhere in Europe - was a man who carefully developed a politics of anti-semitism. Haider claimed to be inspired by the German right philosopher Ernst Forsthoff, who in 1938 wrote that Jews "were not a religious community but a racially foreign body utterly different from the German people".

Haider compared Jews to the Sudeten Germans who lost property and were forced to leave Czechoslovakia in the mass transfers of

peoples that took place in Europe, British India and the Middle East in the years after 1945. When Hitler's aide Rudolf Hess died in Spandau prison in Berlin, Haider wrote Hess had "stayed faithful to true German honour".

Journalists in Europe are reluctant to describe modern anti-semitic politicians as such. Like France's Jean Marie Le Pen who tried unsuccessfully to keep under control his views on Jews, Haider tried to avoid openly direct anti-Jewish remarks.

But by insinuation, choice of metaphor, or expressing his belief that Jews in Germany in 1940 were able to live freely, he was in the mainstream of modern anti-semitism with its banalisation or denial of the Holocaust, its contempt for Israel, and its belief that secret Jewish lobbies have too much power.

In Britain, the only lengthy published works by the BNP leader Nick Griffin are obsessed with Jews. In Who Are the Mindbenders, a pamphlet published in 1997, Griffin depicted the British media in the hands of Jews like Michael Grade who changed their names to avoid identification. In a magazine called The Rune, Griffin argued that "the very idea of Zyklon-B extermination has been exposed