by
Vassilis Petsinis, opendemocracy, 09 Maggio, 2016.

The election to the
Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – a noted supporter of Palestine
and critic of Israeli government policy – surprised many, not least
those in his own party who regard him as too left-wing to win an
election in Britain.

Opponents of Corbyn have
claimed that his assumption of the leadership has coincided with a
rise in antisemitism among Labour members, best exemplified by the
suspension of Labour MP Naz Shah for posting an cartoon that
suggested Israel be relocated in the US in 2014, and of Ken
Livingstone who claimed Hitler was originally a Zionist. 
However,
others have argued that the number of antisemitic attacks has been
exaggerated and misconstrued and that anti-zionism does not equal
antisemitism.

But what does
anti-Semitic party policy and rhetoric look like in Europe today? 
Away from the UK, populist right-wing parties are on the rise across
Europe using hardline anti-Semitic messages to augment their
support. 

Jobbik:
anti-Semitism behind a ’pro-Palestine’ veil

Jobbik remains Hungary’s
third most popular party in its own right. In its vision of Hungary
as a ‘bridge between west and east’, Jobbik has dismissed any charges
of Islamophobia. Furthermore, the party has been quick to strike a
’pro-Palestine’ outlook and castigate Israel not solely for its
aggression against the Palestinians but also over its, allegedly,
belligerent foreign policy towards other states in the Middle East
(namely Iran).


Between 2010 and 2014,
negative references to Israel’s alleged meddling in Hungarian
domestic policies featured quite regularly in Jobbik’s rhetoric. In
its 2010 Party
Manifesto,
Jobbik has been highly dismissive of transnational capitalism and the
suspicious role of multinational corporations in Hungary.


In the party’s speech,
specific
references to the engagement of Israeli companies in Hungary appeared
more frequently than the link between the collapse of certain German
(also Austrian) banks and Hungary’s economic crisis. This campaign
reached its zenith in November 2012 when Martin Gyöngyösi, Jobbik’s
second-in-command, stated that: ’It is high time to figure out
which MPs and government members are of Jewish origin and represent a
security risk to Hungary’.



A few days earlier, the
party-leader, Gábor Vona, had demanded that: ‘Government
members and MPs are screened in order to determine whether any
possess double, Hungarian-Israeli, citizenship’. This informal
statement was made during a ‘pro-Palestine’ rally held by Jobbik
in front of the Israeli embassy.


The main bulk of Jobbik’s
voters have opted for the party mainly
on the basis of its wider ‘anti-systemic’ speech and, to a much
lesser extent, on the grounds of its anti-Semitism. 
Meanwhile, the
new realities of the refugee crisis and the wave of sexual assaults
in Germany on New Year’s Eve, have demonstrated that the party can
be situationally-adaptive in its stance vis-à-vis the Muslim world.


Recently,
Jobbik-affiliates have become highly vocal over the necessity to
safeguard Europe’s Christian pillars of identity and protect
Hungarian/European women from the ‘rapacious Islamic invaders’.
This largely corresponds to the endorsement of a body
politics
approach.



With specific regard to
its anti-Semitism, it becomes rather visible that Jobbik has been
feeding on the propagation of negative Jewish stereotypes on the
level of cultural discourse.


These are mainly the
stereotypes over the, allegedly, conspiring
Jewish nature, the Jewish proneness towards illegitimate networking,
as well as their resistance to integrate
into the
main body of national societies where they live. 
This becomes rather
evident in the party’s more explicit and rather frequent
vilification of Jewry/Israel, despite the attempt to mask this
endeavor behind a more geopolitical, ‘pro-Palestine’, critique.

Naše
Slovensko: anti-Semitism as historical revisionism

In the latest national
elections, Naše
Slovensko
delivered an impressive performance and garnered 8.7% of the vote. By
contrast to Jobbik and its alternative outlook on Islam, this party
never denied their Islamophobia. In particular, Naše
Slovensko managed
to capitalize on popular insecurities over the influx of the first
refugee waves from the Middle East. 
When it comes to anti-Semitic
speech, this party has been less vocal in comparison to Jobbik.


On the level of cultural
discourse, Slovakia is home to negative Jewish stereotypes which are
rather comparable to those in Hungary. 
What seems to be the main
qualitative difference between the two cases is that, in Slovakia,
Naše
Slovensko’s
anti-Semitism forms component of a historical
rehabilitation
project.


In a similar vein to the
Croatian far right vis-à-vis the NDH, the party’s leadership have
been engaged in an endeavor to rehabilitate Josef Tiso’s wartime
Slovak state (1939-1945). 
This Nazi puppet-regime has been charged
with the transportation of Slovakia’s Jewry to death camps across
Eastern Europe.



Naše Slovensko have
sought to rehabilitate the wartime Slovak state through commemorative
venues and the replication of the ‘Hlinka Guard’ militia’s
uniforms. In their public statements, the party-affiliates have not
solely attempted to deconstruct the, erstwhile dominant, Communist
narratives about Josef Tiso.


They have also condemned
the campaign of international Zionism and its ‘domestic
accomplices’ with the objective to falsify history and vilify the
Slovak nation in its entirety. Towards this aim, Naše
Slovensko
has been indirectly facilitated by the abundance of ‘alternative’
outlooks on the wartime state since the end of Communist rule and
Czechoslovakia’s velvet
dissolution
(1990-93). To this, one should also add the older, albeit less
articulate, proposals of rehabilitation by Jan Slota and his Slovak
National Party (SNS).

Towards
a new divide: Cultural
versus
more pragmatic
discourses?

From a macro-political
perspective, one can detect a differentiation between these two
parties and successful right-wing parties in Western Europe. If one
concentrates on Frances’s Front National or Geert Wilders’
Freedom Party, the principal emphasis is laid on Islam. 
In the former
case, Islamic values are interpreted as a potential threat to the
concept of laïcité.



Echoing Pim Fortuyn’s
older remarks, Geert Wilders and other members of the Freedom Party
tend to regard Islam as incompatible to the secular values upon which
Dutch society has been built.


Meanwhile,
Heinz-Christian Strache and his FPÖ in Austria have equally
abstained from anti-Semitic remarks. In this case, dissociating from
allegations of Nazi-origins, since Jörg Haider’s tenure in office,
has long formed a crucial concern.

Instead of drawing a
distinction between eastern cultural
and western pragmatic
outlooks on anti-Semitism, one might argue that the parties discussed
are equally pragmatic in their own terms. As already mentioned,
certain segments of the Hungarian and Slovak electorates opt for
Jobbik or Naše
Slovensko
principally along the lines of their broader ‘anti-systemic’
speech and, to a much lesser extent, because of these parties’
anti-Semitism.

Nevertheless, adding
certain touches of (cultural or quasi-historical) ‘anti-Semitism
without Jews’ helps these parties capitalize more solidly on these
segments’ votes. Moreover, Jobbik’s shift towards an ostensibly
more anti-Islam course demonstrates that such parties can become more
situationally-adaptive than external observers might anticipate.