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Old May 6th, 2012 #16
James Hawthorne
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Great news 25 plus new Golden Dawn MP's - Greece Awake !



Greek election day: Jews worry about far-right

Head of Jewish community in Athens expresses concern over expected election of neo-Nazi party to parliament.



The head of the Jewish community in Athens on Sunday worried two far-right groups might take a seat in Greece's next parliament.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post on the day of the general elections, Benjamin Albalas said his biggest concern was Golden Dawn, a supremacist group expected to enter the Greek legislature for the first time.

"According to the polls the prediction is, unfortunately, that [Golden Dawn] will be elected," the Jewish leader said over the phone from Athens. "This is an insult not just to Jewish people but to the country as a whole. Golden Dawn is not only right or extreme right but a neo-Nazi party. It's a shame to permit this bunch of people to become members of parliament."

Golden Dawn's is a nationalist party hostile to ethnic minorities whose charter excludes "non-aryans" from becoming members. Recent polls indicated the group, whose official emblem is similar to the Nazi swastika, might win five percent of the vote.

The other far-right party predicted to pass the three percent threshold and return to parliament is LAOS, whose founder Giorgos Karatzaferis has repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments. In 2000, for instance, Karatzaferis told the public to vote for his party because it did not have any Jews, communists or homosexuals.

Albalas said he rejected several attempts by Karazaferis to patch up his relationship with the Jewish community in recent years.

"He apologized publicly two years ago but we know who he is and we could not accept this," he said.

Of the two rightist parties, however, the Jewish leader said that Golden Dawn posed a much bigger threat even though their focus was not on the country's Jewish community, which numbers an estimated 5,000 people.

"Now they are attacking Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals and foreign workers but not the Jewish people," Albalas said. "Not yet."

The elections in Greece are taking place under the shadow of the deeply troubled economy. The markets took a nose dive in 2010 after it became apparent that successive governments lied about the size of the national debt. The introduction of reforms and austerity measures at the behest of the German-led European Union has so far failed to put the country on an even keel. Experts say the expected fragmentation of votes among several parties this year and the rise in support for fringe groups is symptomatic of the public's deep disappointment with the system.

Albalas said whoever wins the country's elections the Jewish community hopes the next government would provide stability and repair the broken economy. The Jewish community itself was recently saved from a fiscal crisis after it received money from a coalition of Jewish groups including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and others. Albalas thanked Jewish groups abroad for their help saying the cash infusion prevented the closure of Jewish institutions in Athens, where the largest Jewish community in the country resides.

Still, he said so long as the economy was suffering the community depended on continued outside support.

"The books cannot be balanced because a lot of our income is from property, which is a problem because our tenants threaten to leave and our income is diminished," he said.

http://www.jpost.com/International/A...aspx?id=268884
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Last edited by James Hawthorne; May 6th, 2012 at 12:23 PM. Reason: added news report