Photo Credit: ReutersInside the far-Right stronghold where Hungarian Jews fear for the future

By Colin Freeman. As the self-declared “capital” of the ultra-nationalist Jobbik Party, the town of Tiszavasvári prides itself on being a showcase for how the whole of Hungary might one day look.

Since winning control of Tiszavasvári’s local council three years ago on a pledge to fight “Gipsy crime”, the party has been on a vigorous clean-up campaign, banning prostitution, tidying the streets, and keeping a watchful eye on the shabby Roma districts at the edge of town. It even swore in its own Jobbik “security force” to work alongside the police, only for the uniformed militia, which drew comparisons with Hitler’s brown-shirts, to be banned by Hungary’s national government.

Yet Gipsies are not the only bogeyman that Jobbik has in its sights, as a sign on the well-trimmed green opposite the Communist-era mayoralty building suggests. Written in both Hungarian and Persian, it proudly announces that Tiszavasvári is twinned with Ardabil, a town in the rugged mountains of north-west Iran.

On the face of it, there is no obvious reason why a drab rustbelt town in Hungary’s former mining area should seek links to a city in a hardline Islamic Republic 2,000 miles away. But this is no ordinary cultural exchange programme, and friendship has very little to do with it. Instead, the real purpose of Jobbik’s links to Iran is to show their mutual loathing of the Jewish state of Israel, which the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, notoriously declared should be “wiped from the pages of history”. Read more from this story HERE.

Dangerous Times: Europe’s New Fascist Movements Don’t Hate Islam

By James Lewis and Justine Aristea. There is something strange about the fast-rising European “crypto fascist” movements. They are peas in a pod — with similar political programs, and similar nationalist and anti-capitalist rhetoric. They all hate the two Satans of Iranian propaganda, Israel and America. Yes, the Persian Gulf supplies 40% of Europe’s oil and therefore has vast political power in all the countries where the cryptos operate. But they are realy monomaniacal about Israel, which has nothing like the power of the oil states. Most peculiarly, all those anti-foreigner movements don’t have a bad word to say about 50 million Muslims who now populate the capital cities of Europe. Not one bad word.

All the cryptos use the web to recruit and direct their followers. Just as the invention of radio led to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s mass appeal, the web is doing so for Giuseppe Grillo and all the others. Some of the cryptos therefore want the voting age to be lowered to 16, so they can catch ’em while they’re young.

These movements recruit many thousands of grossly ignorant teens, surfing the web. They use mystery names — Golden Dawn, Red and Black, Five Stars — as if they came from a single cookie cutter. They all try to absolve the faded Nazi and fascist parties of the 30s and 40s.

But most important, while the crypto cults rage against foreigners, none of them criticize mass immigration of Muslims. They treat Muslim immigration the way the U.S. media treat Obama.

This is too much of a coincidence. Human beings are not all alike. When we act like carbon copies, something else is going on. The Communist International (Comintern) has run look-alike parties in Europe since 1900. Local communist parties never criticized Comrade Lenin or smiling Uncle Joe. You could tell their loyalties by their blind spots. Read more from this story HERE.