Social Democratic Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer described right-wing extremist politician Joerg Haider as “a remarkable person” and said people should “pay tribute to him,” at Haider’s funeral ceremony in Klagenfurt, Austria, last week.
While local Austrian authorities declared that an inebriated Haider died last week as the result a high-speed car crash, Karlheinz Klement, a former member of Haider’s ex-party, the Freedom Party, claimed the Mossad assassinated him. Klement’s conspiracy thesis is circulating among Austrian neo-Nazi and right-wing Internet forums.
In the mid 1990s, Haider proclaimed the Freedom Party “to be the PLO of Austria.” He split from the Freedom Party in 2005 and formed the Alliance for the Future of Austria, a hard-line, reactionary and anti-foreigner party.
Haider was notorious for his praise of Nazi employment policies and the Waffen SS, an organization devoted to exterminating European Jewry.
The Waffen SS are “decent individuals with character, who stick to their beliefs despite strong opposition and remain true to them today as well. That is a good basis, my dear friends, for us younger people to inherit,” Haider once said at meeting of the Veterans of the Waffen SS in Austria. — jpost.com