In a letter to EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, Shimon Samuels, proposed that “she end her term with a call to condemn the candidacy of extreme right groups and neo-Nazis for election to the European Parliament on 25 May.”
The Centre urged Ashton “to call publicly on all 28 member-states of the European Union to shun groups that incite to hatred and violence, and take whatever measures available to disqualify their EP electoral candidacy.’’
“Madam High Representative, your call would be a fitting gesture to end your term of office. Silence on this matter would be perceived as indifference”, Samuels wrote.
He mentioned the fact that the openly anti-Semitic, anti-Roma and homophobic Jobbik party in Hungary, whose former Skinhead, Tamas Sneider, has just been elected Vice-President of the Hungarian Parliament.
Sneider was reportedly involved in Roma beatings and even sued by his own parents. Moreover, the newly elected Hungarian government is to hand the Chairmanship of the Parliamentary Committee on Education and Culture to Dura Duro, wife of Jobbik militant Elod Novak.
Asked last week why the couple do not take part in Holocaust commemoration events, he answered ‘we remember only genocides that actually happened’.
‘’Amazingly, the European Peoples’ Party (EPP) group of conservative factions in the European Parliament has accepted Jobbik’s membership,” Samuels noted.
He also gave the example of the racist Belgian extreme-rigt group ‘Debout les Belges!’ (‘Stand-Up Belgians!’) which last Sunday tried to convene a so-called ‘European Dissident’s Congress’ of anti-Semitic figures in Brussels, which - due to the intervention of human rights NGO’s, such as the Wiesenthal Centre - was banned and dispersed by police