By Joelle Diderich
PARIS (Reuters) - French neo-Nazis have formed an alliance with extremist Jewish groups on the Internet to publish a torrent of hate messages directed against Arabs and Muslims, according to a report by a leading anti-racist group.
Members of extreme-right groups were prepared to set aside their anti-Semitic feelings to share Web space and know-how with extremist pro-Israeli campaigners, amid a rise in violence in the Middle East, the study found.
"This is a new phenomenon," Mouloud Aounit, head of the MRAP group which published the 170-page report, said on Thursday.
"We wanted to ring an alarm bell over the worrying development of this form of racism which is not only virtual, but has also spread to everyday life," he said.
The report said 26 websites, traced to far-right and Jewish extremist groups in France, operated from the same server in the United States between 1999 and March this year.
Members of the groups also shared advice on how to send messages without leaving electronic trails.
Investigators believed the sites were taken down because of disagreement between the groups over the U.S.-led war in Iraq, with Jewish extremists supporting the action but some French far-rightists against it.
French police had no immediate comment to the report.
Haim Musicant, director of France's main Jewish organisation, CRIF, condemned all extremist Internet sites and called for a strengthening of laws to fight racism on the Web.
He said he did not know who was behind the sites, but noted there were extremists among both Jews and Muslims.
"This could be the work of provocateurs whose aim is to stoke tensions in France," Musicant said. "If they are Jews, I have no idea, they are isolated individuals who represent nobody but themselves."
INCITEMENT
Aounit said the unlikely alliance could resurface soon.
The report said between 2001 and 2003, the groups sent 1,000 messages a day, including incitements to attack mosques in the hope of triggering civil war between Arabs and other French.
They also included messages calling for the assassination of President Jacques Chirac, referred to ironically as Ben Shirak, whom extremists accused of handing power to Muslim interests.
A year ago, a member of the anti-foreigner National Republican Movement (MNR) tried to gun down Chirac at the annual Bastille Day parade, days after posting a message on a British neo-Nazi Web site boasting that he would soon be famous.
Chirac has called for a crackdown on racism following anti- Semitic attacks and signs that the war in Iraq had increased tension between France's Jews and Muslims.
However, Aounit said the government remained indifferent to the flood of hate messages pouring out over the Internet.
"There is obviously the question of legislation, which must be addressed at the European level, but if there is the political will, if you give cyber-cops the means to investigate, you could very rapidly arrest, identify the authors," he said.
Comments
Hide the following 9 comments
Neo-nazis: they hate jews and love muslims
17.07.2003 18:08
I doubt the 'source' was Reuters at all, but Reuters is so Judeophobic it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
Everyone knows that it's Islamic extremists who are in bed with the neo-nazis. Let's look at the facts shall we:
1) Hatred of Jews
2) Hatred of women, domination and control of women
3) Ethnic supremacism
4) Militarism, support for terrorism
= neo-nazis
= Islamic extremists
Rebecca Grace Ainsworth
on yer bike repat
17.07.2003 18:30
Perhaps it's because they know the French state might take action against whites that murder Jews.
Muslims who organise regular pogroms and rampage through Paris stabbing Jews do so with impunity. Once again, the French play willing host to Nazis, this time Islamic ones.
Ciaran Brynes
Nazis herein dwell
17.07.2003 21:34
Use your discernment
dh
Zionists are not neccessarily Jewish
18.07.2003 01:22
STOP NYC Inc.
Homepage:
http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com
Link
18.07.2003 03:46
STOP NYC Inc.
you're all Nazis! (except the Nazis)
18.07.2003 11:41
a nonny mouse
Rebecca Grace Ainsworth - You are a child or an idiot
18.07.2003 12:39
Haidar
Islam is fascism
18.07.2003 13:13
o Men are superior to women (surah 2:228).
o Women have half the rights of men: in court witness (surah 2:282) and in inheritance
(surah 4:11).
o A man may punish his wife by beating her (surah 4:34).
o A wife is a sex object for her husband (surah 2:223)
o Muslims must fight until their opponents submit to Islam (surah 9:29).
o A Muslim must not take a Jew or a a Christian for a friend (surah 5:51).
o A Muslim apostate must be killed (surah 9:12).
o Resisting Islam is punished by death, crucifixion or the cutting off of the hands and feet (surah 5:33).
Also, according to the hadiths:
o Women are mentally deficient
o Most of the inhabitants of hell are women
o Women are harmful to men and bad omens
o Ethnic cleansing is encouraged
o Spreading Islam by murder guarantees salvation
Islam is fascism, for sure. But that doesn't mean all Muslims are fascists.
R.G.A.
Typical Islamofascist propaganda lies
19.07.2003 10:08
The idea of co-operation between Zionists and nazis is a ridiculous fraud, a recycling of old nazi propaganda. All this shows is that French Islamofascism has reached dangerous levels, and that Arab Naziism is already more inhuman and primitive rhetorically.
Clearly no-one told the nazis they were co-operating with Zionists:
Zionism resulted from thinking about the position of the Jews within their host peoples and from knowledge of their financial and political power. It was an attempt to balance these facts and combat the spiritually divergent tendencies in Jewry. Its founder Herzl spoke more or less openly in various places in his diaries: "Where it exists, one can no longer abolish the legal equality of the Jews. This is not only because it goes against the modern mind, but also because all Jews, rich and poor, would immediately be forced into revolutionary parties. There is really nothing they can do to us. In the past one took their jewelry from the Jews; can one today take their movable wealth? The impossibility of getting at the Jews has only strengthened and embittered hatred. Anti-Semitism grows daily, even hourly, in the population. It will continue to grow since its causes continue to exist and cannot be eliminated." (Th. Herzl, The Jewish State ). "I do not wish to write about the history of the Jews. It is familiar. I must mention only one thing: In our two thousand years in the Diaspora, there has been no unified leadership. That is what I think is our primary misfortune." To overcome this "misfortune," Herzl founded political Zionism.
Non-Jewish observers and writers on Zionism who see political Zionism only as an attempt at "national renewal" rather than an effort to establish a unified Jewish leadership as well as Jewish rule over the world, are therefore incorrect. The confusion of political Zionism with Palestine can be understood only through the Jewish prophecies in which Jewry is assured of control over all the goods of this world. Knowing that the time was near, and would culminate in taking possession of Palestine, Zionism developed the nonsensical notion of an "historic claim" to the "promised land," to which Jews "without any outside pressure" would gradually immigrate.
In the ideology of political Zionism, Palestine fulfilled the role of an indispensable part of prophecy, just as certain rules are the guarantee for success of the magical ceremonies of primitive peoples. Political Zionism never intended Palestine to be the destination of all Jews, rather it merely wants to make Palestine the center of Jewish world policy. That must naturally be protected by a strong Jewish population. The Zionist publication Jüdische Rundschau wrote: "No one at any time has proposed that all Jews today should emigrate to Palestine." Nabum Sokolow, Weizmann's colleague and current chairman of the Zionist Committee, said it clearly in 1921: "The Jewish people wants to return to Palestine, the Jewish people will have its center in Palestine. Large parts of Jewry will live as a Jewish periphery in the world. They must be cared for, their dignity and their national rights must be assured."
This is also clear from the text of the state treaty Jewry concluded with England, the so-called Balfour Declaration: "His Majesty's Government favors the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jews, and we will make the greatest efforts to reach this goal, although it is clearly understood that nothing will be done that will affect the civil and religious rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political standing of Jews in any other country."
That provides a correction to the idealization of Zionism, which springs from a different race. From a political standpoint, it would be in the interests of the whole world, of all the host peoples, if the Jews now scattered throughout the whole world were to voluntarily emigrate to some habitable territory. If political Zionism were not interested in such a solution to the Jewish Question, it would be in the interests of the host peoples to point it in that positive direction. The only question would be whether Palestine is the proper gathering place, which no one would likely maintain. Palestine is not able to absorb all the Jews in the world, entirely aside from the fact of increasing Arab opposition to Jewish infiltration. The Arabs are after all the undisputed owners of the land. But what other territory would be appropriate? And at the instant Palestine ceased to be the the goal of Jewish emigration, political Zionism would collapse, since Palestine is seen as a means for the fulfillment of prophecy. Without that, the whole enterprise would lose its point. Jewry itself would make the most passionate and bitter attacks, and before long any undertaking that ignored Palestine would be crippled by Jewry itself. Palestine incorporates for Jewry its special position. Ignoring this would be ethnic suicide for Jewry, since political Zionism also has as a goal maintaining and strengthening Jewry's special situation.
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