Austrian rightist in hot water for verbal attack on Jewish leader

May 27, 2009, 15:24 GMT

Vienna - Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann on Wednesday called on far-right legislator Martin Graf to step down as deputy president of parliament after his verbal attack on the leader of Vienna's Jewish community.

Graf had blasted Jewish leader Ariel Muzicant for his critical stance towards his party.

In a commentary published in the newletter of his Freedom Party (FPOe), Graf said many Austrian were asking themselves whether Muzicant was 'fostering antifascist leftist terrorism' and 'a climate of political brutality.'

The dispute surrounding the contentious rightist politician marked a new low point in Austria's election race for the European Union parliament that has been dominated by the FPOe's anti-foreigner campaign targeting non-Christians, rather than by European issues.

'I expect someone who commits such a lapse to take the necessary steps and resign,' Austrian press agency APA reported the social democratic chancellor as saying in Brussels.

His call was echoed by Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger, whose mainstream conservative People's Party forms a coalition with the Social Democratic Party.

Graf's comments likely referred to leftist activists who staged a partially violent counter-demonstration when the Freedom Party protested a new Islamic cultural centre in Vienna in mid-May.

Muzicant had said shortly afterwards that the Freedom Party's tone reminded him of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister.

Campaigning against Turkey's joining the EU in the runup to the union-wide polls, the Freedom Party chose a slogan that calls for keeping the 'occident in Christian hands.'

Martin Graf is a member of a right-wing student union that has contacts with neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. The Freedom Party, led by Heinz-Christian Strache, won 17.5 per cent in the parliamentary election last autumn.