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Martin Graf, a 48-year-old lawyer, is a member of a student combat fraternity called “Olympia” that has contacts with neo-nazis and Holocaust deniers.
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VIENNA (EJP)---The Austrian Jewish community has criticized the election Tuesday by the new Austrian Parliament of an extreme-rightist MP known to be a nostalgic of the Third Reich, as its vice-president,
Martin Graf, a 48-year-old lawyer, is a member of a student fraternity union called “Olympia” that has contacts with neo-nazis and Holocaust deniers. He is also an MP from the extreme-right Freedom Party (FPO) which has made important gains in general elections last month.
70 percent of the members of the Austrian parliament supported Graf’s candidacy, including the mainstream conservative People’s Party (OVP).
In the last two weeks, former concentration camp inmates, Vienna's Jewish community, artists and other members of the civil society had written several open letters to MPs, asking them not to vote for Graf.
Austrian MPs "made a symbolic decision which can lead to a further strengthening of the right-wing extremist camp and which shows little sensibility for Austrian history and the tragic results of German nationalism," the Vienna Jewish community said.
“The fact that he could be elected vice-president of the Austrian Parliament should light warning signals not only in Austria but all over Europe,” the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem said.
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The two Austrian extreme-right parties, the Freedom Party and the Alliance for Austria's Future led by Joerg Haider who died in a car accident earlier this month, nearly doubled the number of voter support in the 30 September elections to a combined 28 percent, but neither of them is likely to be included in the next coalition government.
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Although Graf recently issued a lengthy statement in which he condemned racism, anti-Semitism and "all crimes committed in the name of a misguided ideology," he said he would remain a member of the Olympia student union, whose website praises the "community of the German people and German culture."
According to press reports, Olympia has invited extremist speakers and artists to its meetings, such as the German musician Michael Mueller, who is infamous for a song making fun of the millions of Jews who died in the gas chambers, and British Holocaust denier David Irving who was on his way to address the group when he was arrested on November 11, 2005 and later expelled from Austria.
Like other members of his party, Graf has called into question Austria's law that bans neo-Nazi activities.
He also voiced sympathy for Norbert Burger, an Austrian neo-Nazi convicted in Italy of terrorist activities, in a recent television interview. Austria dissolved Burger's National Democratic Party in 1988 after the nation's top court ruled it was reviving Nazi ideology.
In a recent interview with the Austrian public television, Graf was asked whether he acknowledged the murder of millions of Jews by the Nazis. He avoided answering explicitly, saying merely that “masses of people were annihilated and I cannot approve that.”