Haider Trades Barbs With Jews
Far-right leader Joerg Haider accused Austrian Jewish leader Ariel Muzicant Thursday of being "unpatriotic" and spreading lies abroad about alleged threats to his community.
Haider said Muzicant had claimed Jews would be endangered by the advent to power of Haider's Freedom Party last year in a coalition with Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's conservative People's Party.
He quoted from a letter he said was written on behalf of Muzicant saying right-wing politicians posed a dangerous new threat in Austria and suggesting that Jews might face violence, harassment and intimidation.
"This is an unpatriotic act hostile to Austria and it deserves to be criticized regardless of where it comes from," Haider told a news conference on the final day of campaigning for Vienna local elections Sunday.
Muzicant, who is already suing Haider for libel for previous remarks that have widely been branded anti-Semitic, denied that the Austrian Jewish community (IKG) had any part in the letter from the World Jewish Congress (WJC) sounding the alarm about Jewry in Austria.
"The action by the WJC was carried out without agreement with or information from the IKG," he said in a statement. "The IKG protested strongly against it."
"Haider has been trying for weeks to use anti-Semitism in the election campaign in Vienna."
Haider said WJC President Edgar Bronfman wrote to Jews in the United States on behalf of Muzicant last year asking for emergency contributions so that the Jewish body could better monitor the plight of Austrian Jews.
The letter, a copy of which Haider gave to Reuters, said contributions would help "prevent Jews from being singled out for harassment, intimidation, violence, and persecution in Austria and other nations where right-wing politicians pose a new and dangerous threat."
Haider said Austria's 30,000 Jews were not endangered and that, on the contrary, the government had negotiated agreements on compensation payments to Nazi-era slave laborers.
He defended his controversial recent remark that Muzicant had "Dreck am Stecken," which literally means dirt sticking to someone, and is broadly interpreted as meaning "to have skeletons in the closet," or a shady, criminal past.
"He is an Austrian citizen. It appears to me to be absolutely inadmissible that an Austrian citizen should speak badly of his country abroad, say untruthful things about his country and create opinion against Austria," Haider said.
He said no Austrian citizen, regardless of religion, should think he could criticize other people with impunity.
Haider, provincial governor of the southern province of Carinthia, dominates the Freedom Party, although he is no longer its official leader.
The outspoken politician is best known internationally for controversial remarks about Austria's Nazi past for which he later apologize.
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