All Rightists Are Not Fascists

To Ground Zero, or next to it, to meet Jorg Haider, the governor of Carinthia and head of the Freedom Party of Austria. There are not many politicians quite like Haider around, certainly not in Europe, where they tend to run to fat, bald, ugly and definitely hypocritical. Haider is trim, athletic, with a full head of hair, suntanned and good-looking, just like the Austrians one sees in ski movies. He also speaks his mind. I particularly liked his aides, young Austrian men with very good manners and none of that "Who the hell are you?" look so many gofers for American politicians carry around like a rash.

Haider and his Italian counterpart, Renzo Tondo, were here for the presentation of a "special holiday for children who lost parents in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center." The kids will be the guests of the Carinthian and Friuli-Venezia Giulia governments this coming August, where they will be able to swim in some of the most picturesque lakes and climb the most beautiful mountains of Europe. The event took place in the auditorium of the Federal Reserve Building, with the NYPD and FDNY present, as well as many Austrian and Italian diplomats.

Thanks to my friend, ambassador Hans Janitschek, I had some time with Gov. Haider alone before the press conference, where I'm told Christopher Hitchens?up from Washington?asked Haider whether he was gay. The answer was no. That's a new one for me. Haider is very much married, has two children, and there's never been a suggestion that he likes boys. Very much a gentleman, he did not ask Hitchens the same question, which would have been far more appropriate, at least according to my information.

Be that as it may, Haider plans to run again for governor sometime next year and then look to Europe. What does looking to Europe mean? What I think it does is that Austria is a bit too small for him. Haider plans to unite a group?not form a party?of center-right people like those of Lega Norte in Northern Italy, the Bavarians, the Dutch and the Danes.

He was not very kind about Le Pen, which did not best please me. Haider, Le Pen, the recently assassinated Fortuyn, Kjaersgaard in Denmark, Bossi in Italy and the Belgian party Vlaams Blok all have two things in common. They are against the spoils system of Brussels, and against unlimited immigration. To the unelected elite bureaucrooks who rule Brussels, however, and to those who, like Chirac, are elected in a nonstop version of corrupt musical chairs, these center-right people represent the worst danger of all?depriving them of their spoils.

So what are the crooks doing about it? Easy. Here's Pim Fortuyn on the subject: "If you try to discuss multiculturalism in the UK you're labeled a racist. But here we're still free to talk, and I say multicultural society doesn't work. We're not living closer, we're living apart."

Well, he may have been free to discuss multiculturalism, but he paid for it with his life. What amazes me is the lukewarm reaction to the murder on the part of both the European and American media. Volkert van der Graaf, the alleged assassin, has not been pilloried for his foul act, but shown to be an almost sensitive soul who worried a lot about the environment. This eco-fanatic phenomenon is nothing new. His ilk has been threatening and sabotaging factories and people's homes for years, especially in England, and it was only a matter of time before someone pulled the trigger.

Most Americans do not visit Europe, and if they do, they stick to picture postcard places like Florence, Rome, Salzburg, the Hague and the Left Bank of Paris. But the real Europe is places like Manchester and Birmingham, Rotterdam and the northern suburbs of Paris, with its no-go areas for non-Muslims, its boarded buildings, the litter-covered streets, the graffiti and the violence. In the French Alsatian city of Strasbourg, where Arab gangs constantly fight a ritual war against bourgeois society, with 1300 cars set on fire last year, one quarter of the population voted for Le Pen. Yet the very people who voted for him were too scared to go on record as having done so. The charge of racism has become what the midnight knock was during Stalin's reign of terror. (The fact that every anti-Semitic act has been perpetrated by young Arab thugs does not seem to bother various Jewish groups over here. They're screaming bloody murder over European anti-Semitism, where there's nothing of the kind.)

The first line of defense by the bureaucrooks is charging anyone who disagrees with their open borders policy with racism. Once you're labeled a racist, the media do the rest. A racist is by nature also an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a sexist, you name it. The media is, both in Europe and in the United States, 90 percent on the left of center. It also revels in using adjectives such as racist and anti-Semite. The media had a lot to do with Fortuyn's murder. His popularity stemmed from his stand on immigration. In this he echoed public concern about immigrants and asylum-seekers pouring into the Netherlands and profiting unfairly from the welfare system. The press made him out to be some kind of Hitler, a monster that treated Muslims as Untermenschen. Yet Holland has been the country that has embraced immigrants like no other. Ten percent of the country's 16 million people are not of Dutch or European descent.

What is offensive about the media is its eagerness to paint everyone of the right as fascist. Remember what Haider went through a few years ago because 27 percent of the Austrians dared vote for his Freedom Party? The viciousness of the ruling bureaucrooks like Louis Michel, the Belgian foreign minister, was equaled only when Le Pen won the first round three weeks ago. None of the names I mentioned that make up the center-right of Europe are remotely the monsters the press and the left makes them out to be. They are cultural nationalists, pure and simple, and they are not against Arabs or Jews, or immigrants in general. As Le Pen pointed out, the left has made the immigrant its new totem in the place of the worker, but without really ever having cared for either. The idea that Le Pen wanted to cleanse France of its present immigrant population is total nonsense, but the left repeated it ad nauseam, as did the supine media.

In Haider's case, ditto. All he said was that Austria, a tiny country of eight million, could not afford to take in immigrants in the numbers it did up to now. Out came the cartoons of Hitler, mustache and all. And there's something else. In America, which is turning brown as quickly as Europe, immigrants tend to integrate far better than in Europe, where the welfare system is such it makes it easier to stay home and collect rather than work. What so many of us find offensive is the fact that Muslims come to Europe and expect the Europeans to adjust to their religion and their customs. The fact that mullahs preach death to Christians right in the middle of London with impunity shows how truly corrupt our elite have become. The so-called 20th hijacker of 9/11, Zacarias Moussaoui, turned into an Islamofascist while living on welfare in London.

There are thousands like him all over Europe, yet the left and the media can only think to use the F word the moment anyone dares say enough is enough. I hope the Americans take a lesson on how not to do it from those Eurocrooks, but I'm not holding my breath.