antifa notes (november 14, 2011)

Czech Republic

Five charged with promoting Nazism on Facebook, ROMEA, November 11, 2011:

Five men from Kroměříž have been charged with promoting Nazism on the Facebook social networking site. The men used their profiles to publish video footage of Nazi symbols and music videos with neo-Nazi themes. The lyrics to the music featured a racist subtext inciting hatred against people not of the “Aryan” race, Kroměříž District State Prosecutor Pavel Pukovec told the Czech Press Agency last week. If found guilty, the men face between three and 10 years in prison.

Ouch.

England

‘Hope Not Hate’ has profiled the fascist groupuscule New Right. In Australia, the New Right banner was briefly raised–along with “national anarchism”–by the Sydney-based, German neo-Nazi, Welf Herfurth. He subsequently appears to have mostly abandoned his efforts to instead promote the work of the openly neo-Nazi groupuscule Volksfront Australia. In June, Herfurth’s San Franciscan-based acolyte “Andrew Yeoman” (Andrew White) closed shop on his BANANA sect, while Herfurth’s Melbourne follower Scott Harrison has declared himself a Reverend in a tinpot White supremacist kvlt known as Creativity.

Germany

LEAD: German prosecutors: Neo-Nazis suspected in Turkish murders
DPA
Nov 11, 2011

Berlin – Three apparent neo-Nazis who spent 13 years on the run are the main suspects in the murders of nine shopkeepers of Turkish and Greek origin in Germany, prosecutors said Friday.

‘There is sufficient evidence that the murders may have been the work of a far-right group,’ prosecutors said in Karlsruhe.

A woman is in custody and is likely to be charge with murder.

The two men, who are also suspected of robbing a bank, were found dead in a burnt-out camper van this week. They are believed to have shot themselves.

The point-blank shootings of shopkeepers from 2000-06 had puzzled German police for years and spread fear among minorities.

The victims were shot in the head by attackers who walked into their shops, then walked away. The only common factor was that the victims were males of Turkish appearance.

The three suspects vanished in 1998 just as police were to arrest them for planting two bombs, neither of which exploded, with neo-Nazi motives.

They had since been moving around Germany, living under false names, police said earlier this week.

Federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe said the pistol used to kill the shopkeepers was found in the men’s flat in the city of Zwickau, eastern Germany.

Police searching the camper van containing the bodies of the men, aged 34 and 38, also found two pistols stolen in a 2007 attack on police in the city of Heilbronn. A 24-year-old policewoman was killed and a policeman critically wounded in the attack.

Federal prosecutors said the woman was suspected of membership in a terrorist group, murder, attempted murder and arson, adding that other neo-Nazis may have had connections with the trio.

BACKGROUND: Serial killing of migrants in Germany started in 2000
DPA
Nov 11, 2011

Hamburg – A series of killings of immigrant businessmen in Germany began in 2000, and police now suspect all were the work of a neo-Nazi group.

Eight of the victims – who all ran small businesses – were Turkish-born, and one was of Greek origin. All nine were shot dead at close range with the same gun, a Czech-made Ceska 7.65-millimetre pistol, police ballistics experts said.

Two victims operated doner kebab food stands, leading media to term the attacks the ‘doner murders.’ Others ran newspaper stands and other small businesses of the type operated by people with little capital but willing to work long hours.

The victims were shot in broad daylight by an assailant who calmly walked away afterwards and was not recognized by witnesses.

Police, who led a national inquiry, said three killings took place in Nuremberg, two in Munich and one each in the cities of Kassel, Hamburg, Rostock and Dortmund.

The series began with the killing of a florist in September 2000 and lasted until April 2006.

It was not immediately clear Friday if a similar killing last week of a 41-year-old doner kebab seller in the eastern German city of Chemnitz was also carried out by the same group.

There has been some speculation that–gasp!–authorities in the state of Thuringia–specifically those belonging to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution–assisted the suspects avoid arrest. Julia Jüttner, Birger Menke and Christian Teevs (‘The Bomb-Makers of Jena’: Suspects in Bizarre Case Identified as Neo-Nazis, Der Spiegel, November 10, 2011) ask:

How can three people under the observation of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency just disappear — and commit crimes — for such a long period? Especially given that domestic intelligence has no small number of informants in the far-right scene?

Take, for example, Timo Brandt, the leading figure in “Heimatschutz Thuringia” as well as its forerunner group, the “Anti-Antifa Ostthüringen.” It was revealed in 2001 that Brandt had been an informant for Thuringia’s state Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Under the codename “Otto,” he worked as an informant for several years and earned a handsome 200,000 deutsche marks (about $100,000 at the time) for his services. He would later claim that he re-invested the money into political activities and propaganda.

A fourth suspect, Holger G., has also been arrested, and the “National Socialist Underground” dubbed the ‘Brown Army Faction’ in reference to the Red (German government concerned about homegrown, right-wing terrorism, Deutsche Welle, November 13, 2011).

Norway

On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe is a new e-book edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze; in it “a collection of Australian and British writers respond to the terrorist attack by Anders Breivik, and attempts by the Right to depoliticise it”.

Poland

On November 11 (Independence Day) in Warsaw several thousand far-right nationalists and football hooligans held a march through the centre of town. An account of the small riot and a smaller, anti-fascist counter-demonstration/’blockade’ which accompanied the march is provided by blogger ‘Radically Real’:Independence Day in Warsaw, November 12, 2011. See also : Antifa blockade Warsaw : November 11, 2010, November 7, 2010.

Russia

Russian nationalists march in Moscow, Clara Weiss, wsws.org, November 11, 2011:

On November 4, Russian ultra-nationalist tendencies held a so-called Russian March on the outskirts of Moscow to mark the country’s Day of National Unity. The event, organized by several far-right and neo-Nazi groups, attracted several thousand participants according to various estimates. Some coverage reported that the protesters were mainly youth, wearing masks and chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans such as, “Russia for Russians” and “We will build a white paradise! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

Spain

November 11 was the four-year anniversary of the murder of 16-year-old Spanish skinhead Carlos Javier Palomino by the neo-Nazi Spanish soldier Josué Estébanez. In October 2009, Estébanez was sentenced to 26 years jail for the crime.

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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