Tagged with The Australian

Antifa Australia goes for the jugular (while I make some comments) …

On the weekend The Australian published a lengthy article by Chip Le Grand on antifa in Australia.

Below are some comments.

Antifa Australia goes for the jugular
Chip Le Grand
The Australian
December 9, 2017

The first rule of antifa is you do not talk about antifa. Not to a journalist, at any rate. It is less an organisation than a broad objective across the radical left; a determination to block, frustrate and ultimately silence far-right politics. It is fundamentally illiberal and necessarily secretive. For these reasons, it is poorly understood and readily mischaracterised.

Ssshhh …

To the best of my knowledge, there have only been one or two occasions on which anTEEfa in Australia have spoken to journalists. First, ‘Beneath the black mask: inside Australia’s anti-fascist Antifa groups’ (Peter Munro, The Sydney Morning Herald, May 21, 2016) contains interviews with three anti-fascists. Secondly, a former anti-fascist, Shayne Hunter, was recently interviewed for a piece in the Murdoch press (‘I established a terror movement in Australia, and I quit’, news.com.au, October 25, 2017). Perhaps the first time the term was used in media reportage in a local context was 2014 (Australia’s Golden Dawn Rally Falls Embarrassingly Flat, Lauren Gillin, VICE, May 7, 2014). See also : Cronulla protests: what is the anti-fascist group Antifa?, Michael McGowan, The Sydney Morning Herald, December 12, 2015 | Explainer: what is antifa, and where did it come from?, Troy Whitford, The Conversation, August 30, 2017.

Beyond that: while it’s true that ant-fascists generally seek to disrupt fascist organising, completely eradicating far-right and fascist politics is hardly an achievable objective. Instead, most seek to simply limit, as much as possible and given the means available, the growth of such political expressions. The liberality of these actions, as well as their public status, is generally determined by their context.

Antifa activists are not mindless thugs. They are well organised and, generally, experienced political and social activists who are prepared to resort to violence — they say reluctantly — to deny the far right any platform from which to promote its ideas. In Melbourne and Sydney this week, they mobilised more than 100 supporters within an hour to shout down a speaking event by the alt-right’s charismatic bomb thrower, Milo Yiannopoulos.

Leaving aside the alleged mindlessness and thuggery (and the claim that Milo is ‘charismatic’), the fact that several hundred people (ie, several hundred more than 100) mobilised in Melbourne in order to protest Milo Yiannopoulos’s performance at Melbourne Pavilion last Monday was. not. simply. the result of a preparedness to act at short notice, but rather active campaigning over months (and years).

[snip] The antifa view of the world is that far-right politics — particularly white supremacy, nationalist chauvinism and the kind of fascism that tore Europe apart in the middle of the 20th century — is again on the rise across Western democracies.

Accurate or otherwise, that’s not a view confined to those actively opposing white supremacy and ultra-nationalism, as a search for relevant materials would demonstrate. To put it another way: there’s a rational basis for concern over a resurgent far-right in Europe, both Western and Eastern. That said, Australia is somewhat peculiar in terms of Western democracies, a theme also explored in the relevant literature. Or as Oswald Mosley claimed in 1933: ‘I always thought it remarkable that Australia, without studying the Fascist political philosophy and methods, so spontaneously developed a form of fascism peculiarly suited to the needs of the British Empire.’ See also : Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACRAWSA).

In the US, this conviction has made bedfellows of anarchists, Marxists, socialists, anti-racists and other militant activists beneath the antifa doona. In Australia, existing left-wing groups such as Socialist Alternative have diverted resources from other campaigns to fight what they describe as the fascist menace. New groups, such as Jews Against Fascism, have formed to fight the far right.

The start of this counterculture war can be traced to the Easter weekend two years ago when a large Reclaim Australia rally took over Melbourne’s Federation Square. Hassan is a 31-year-old bartender and events manager. He is also an active member of Socialist Alternative who contributes regularly to its online publication, Red Flag. “The size and breadth of that mobilisation of the far right shook many of us up,” he says. “Nationally, we decided to prioritise anti-fascist organising.”

The same event prompted Jordana Silverstein, a University of Melbourne academic, to form Jews Against Fascism. “We fundamentally disagree that if you ignore fascists they will go away,” she tells Inquirer. “They don’t. They become emboldened.”

In the US, contemporary antifa activity is generally traced back to the 1980s, when youth subcultures like skinhead and punk were the subject of concerted efforts at infiltration by the radical right, which in turn generated (militant) opposition. Hence it was in the late ’80s that Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) formed in New York and Anti-Racist Action (ARA) was born, the groundwork for the latter being laid by a skinhead crew in Minneapolis called The Baldies. (ARA’s contemporary expression is the Torch network.) A lot has happened between Then and Now, but certainly the Trump era has given added impetus to antifa organising in the US. See also : Inside the Underground Anti-Racist Movement That Brings the Fight to White Supremacists, Wes Enzinna, Mother Jones, May/June 2017.

In Australia, I’d argue that ‘the start of this counterculture war’ was a little earlier than April 4, 2015. Certainly, if anti-fascism is ‘less an organisation than a broad objective across the radical left; a determination to block, frustrate and ultimately silence far-right politics’, then its origins in Australia may be traced back as far as the 1920s and to the Italian migrant anti-fascists (see : Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Italians in Australia: 1922–1945, Gianfranco Crestiani, Australian National University, 1980). More recently, anti-fascists in Melbourne actively campaigned against Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and National Action in the 1990s. [For (Marxist) analysis, see : How we stopped Pauline Hanson last time, Tess Lee Ack, Marxist Left Review, No.12 (Winter 2016) / Understanding Hansonism (Ben Reid) & When the Australian ruling class embraced fascism (Louise O’Shea), Marxist Left Review, No.13 (Summer 2017).]

Otherwise: SAlt was largely absent on April 4, 2015, this also being the weekend of their annual Marxism conference, and the opposition to Reclaim on that occasion was drawn from other segments of Teh Left in Melbourne.

The antifa armoury includes more than protest chants and punches. Mark Bray, formerly an activist in the Occupy Wall Street movement, is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, published in Australia by Melbourne University Press. In interviews with anti-fascist activists in Europe and the US, Bray explores antifa tactics including the dark art of doxxing, a form of online sabotage pioneered by computer hackers.

In the antifa context, doxxing means the outing of Nazi sympathisers — the publication of ­information that identifies anonymous far-right bloggers or activists, which in turn puts pressure on employers to sack them. This year a University of Nebraska philosophy student, Cooper Ward, was doxxed and unmasked as the voice on an anti-Semitic podcast, The Daily Shoah. Bray says he was driven off campus and into hiding.

“Despite the media portrayal of a deranged, bloodthirsty antifa … the vast majority of anti-fascist tactics involve no physical violence whatsoever,” Bray writes.

“Anti-fascists conduct research on the far right online, in person and sometimes through infiltration; they dox them, push cultural milieux to disown them, pressure bosses to fire them and demand that venues cancel their shows, conferences and meetings; they organise educational events, reading groups, trainings, athletic tournaments and fundraisers; they write articles, leaflets and newspapers, drop banners, and make videos … But it is also true that some of them punch Nazis in the face and don’t apologise for it.”

Got d0x?

First, yes, ‘d0xxing’ is A Thing … though in Australia it tends not to extend as far as it does elsewhere. Thus, in my own case, while I’ve named a number of local AltRight figures — David Hilton (‘Moses Apostaticus’) is one recent example — I don’t publish full deets, most infos is drawn from open-sources and often relies upon simply drawing upon previous research (or is the result of a tip-off). Thus it’s also been possible to identify a number of the nazis who assembled outside Melbourne Pavilion last week simply by referring to previously published material. Inre Cooper Ward and ‘The Daily Shoah’, Ward was one of several neo-Nazis ‘outed’ at this time, including Mike Peinovich (‘Mike Enoch’). His outing as a neo-Nazi activist resulted, inter alia, in his separation from his (Jewish) wife — but the Shoah must and has gone on. Unmentioned but relevant in this context is that both the sitting MP George Christensen and former Labor leader turned angry old pensioner Mark Latham have appeared as guests on the podcast network TRS (for which ‘The Convict Report’ is the local expression).

[snip] A problem for the Australian antifa, and indeed for anti-fascist groups in Europe and the US, is that few people and organisations they oppose here have much to do with Nazism. Consider the rollcall of hard-right leaders who turned out in Kensington in support of Yian­nopoulos. Neil Erikson, a far-right agitator and leader of a small group known as Patriot Blue, used to be a Nazi but in recent years has publicly disavowed his former beliefs and now says he is a supporter of Israel.

Who you calling a Nazi, Nazi?

First, Erikson has publicly acknowledged the fact that, from his early- to mid- teens through until the end of 2015/beginning of 2016, he considered himself — and was considered by others — a neo-Nazi activist. A former member and/or associate of Blood & Honour and Nationalist Alternative, Erikson, in addition to having a criminal conviction for stalking a rabbi (February 2014), also ran with the short-lived gang ‘Crazy White Boys’, responsible for the attempted murder of Vietnamese student Minh Duong in 2012. Secondly, prior to ‘Patriot Blue’, Erikson had cycled through numerous other brands and Facebook platforms, and no doubt will jump on another bandwagon when it suits him. Finally, given his record, it’s not unreasonable to view Erikson’s posturings — first as a neo-Nazi, now as a ‘supporter of Israel’ — with some degree of skepticism, and to view his performances as being simply (and more accurately) opportunistic exercises by an attention-seeking, racist, meathead.

Blair Cottrell, the hulking former leader of the defunct United Patriots Front, is fascinated by Adolf Hitler as a historical figure but ridicules neo-Nazism as a contemporary political movement.

Or; Pull the other one (it’s got bells on).

Of course, being a semi-rational political actor, Cottrell doesn’t want to be known as a neo-Nazi. Like others, he understands that this is — still — a political kiss-of-death, properly the domain of uniform fetishists. That said, the reasons he may be described as one are rather more extensive than an apparent fascination with Mister Hitler: from celebrating his birthday to expressing a desire for every Australian school child to be issued with a copy of Mein Kampf … annually. Cottrell’s determination to fight the moral and political degeneracy allegedly caused by The Jew — of which ‘Cultural Marxism’, ‘feminism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ are major symptoms — lies at the heart of his political vision. I documented this in early 2015, collecting a series of his online postings on sites like Facebook and YouTube and republishing them as ‘Quotations From Chairman Blair Cottrell’ (July 27, 2015). Elements of this formed the basis of a The Sydney Morning Herald article published in October 2015 (Blair Cottrell, rising anti-Islam movement leader, wanted Hitler in the classroom, Michael Bachelard, Luke McMahon, October 17, 2015). Leaving aside the fact that Cottrell and the UPF lodged with members of Aryan Nations when they held a rally in Perth; that Queensland neo-Nazi Jim Perren, along with fellow neo-Nazi Bradley Trappitt (Combat 18), organised their failed party launch in Toowoomba in early 2016 (Perren described it as a mini-Nuremberg rally minus the swastikas); that in their internal discussions Cottrell recommended reading The Protocols; that the UPF gave birth to Antipodean Resistance and The Lads Society … leaving all that, and much more, aside, it’s also the case that Cottrell was denounced as a ‘Nazi’ by his former UPF colleagues Shermon Burgess and Neil Erikson. Finally, the words of Jean-Paul Sartre are rather apt in this context:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

To continue:

Avi Yemini, a tough-on-crime activist, is a former Israeli soldier. He recently joined Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives and hopes to stand as a candidate in next year’s Victorian election.

Yemini is not a neo-Nazi, though he wouldn’t be the first Jew to assume such a mantle (cf. Danny Burros and Nathaniel Jacob Sassoon Sykes). Indeed, in May 2013, one Jewish bloke and Republican Party booster, David Cole/Stein, was exposed as a Holocaust denialist; most recently, he’s gone into bat for local ‘transcendental’ fascist Richard Wolstencroft. In any case, Yemini certainly loves associating with neo-Nazis and other fascists, and rarely misses an opportunity to join with them in castigating Bad People (leftists, Muslims, et. al.) for their crimes. On his relationship to the wider Jewish community, this statement by the Australian Jewish Democratic Society is germane.

As for Yiannopoulos, although some of his supporters are Nazi sympathisers — Inquirer was sent a picture of a man giving a Nazi salute as he walked out of his Kensington speaking engagement — there is scant evidence that he is.

When Yiannopoulos was preparing a treatise on the alt-right for the Breitbart website early last year, he sought the input of a white nationalist blogger and self-described Nazi, Andrew Auernheimer, and forwarded it along with contributions from other hard-right figures to his co-author, a Breitbart staff journalist. When the Buzzfeed news site obtained emails exchanged between Auernheimer and Yiannopoulos, it reported them as proof that “Breitbart and Milo smuggled Nazi and white nationalist ideas into the mainstream.” There was no smuggling involved, Nazi or otherwise; Yiannopoulos’s treatise was a rambling cook’s tour of right-wing groups, with Auernheimer quoted as an on-the-record source.

O RLLY.

Actually, the Buzzfeed article — Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream (Joseph Bernstein, October 6, 2017) — does a little more than document the fact that Yiannopoulos sought the input of neo-Nazi weev into one article he — or rather one of his Breitbart lackeys — wrote. Inter alia, the article ‘also reported that Yiannopoulos’s passwords included references to Kristallnacht, the 1938 anti-Semitic German pogrom that historians mark as the beginning of the Holocaust, and the Night of the Long Knives, the murderous 1934 purge of Hitler’s onetime allies by Nazi paramilitaries.’ It also contains footage of Milo singing karaoke while his friends make Nazi salutes. In any case, Roger Mercer, the billionaire hedge-fund manager bankrolling Breitbart and Milo, recently withdrew his support (citing ‘personal reasons’ for doing so).

[snip] The fallout for antifa [from Milo’s cancelled gig at Berkeley] has been mixed. Speaking to Inquirer from New York, Bray says the movement is stronger and better organised than it was a year ago. “The spectacle of Berkeley and the precedent it set emboldened a lot of anti-racists and anti-fascists,’’ he says. “It was a call to arms for the movement.’’

Berkeley also set in train a series of events that last week culminated in FBI director Christopher Wray announcing that antifa activists were the subject of a counter-terrorism investigation. Wray told the US House of Representatives homeland security committee: “While we are not investigating antifa as antifa — that’s an ideology and we don’t investigate ideologies — we are investigating a number of what we would call anarchist-extremist … people who are motivated to commit violent criminal activity on a kind of antifa ideology.’’

(Don’t Talk To The) FBI

On June 15, 1917, President Wilson signed the Espionage Act, which delineated punishments for foreign spies and prohibited organized resistance to WWI. A great deal of repressive federal and state legislation followed, including the Trading with the Enemy and Sedition Acts. The government apparatus for enforcing these laws also expanded, including to the recently formed Bureau of Investigation (a precursor to the FBI). These mechanisms were used against anarchists, the IWW, and other left-wing organizations: on the same day that the Espionage Act took effect, police arrested Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The leader of the Socialist Party, Eugene Debs, was sentenced to ten years in prison for delivering an antiwar speech in Ohio in June, 1918. The ‘Red Scare’ of 1917–1921 reached a peak with the Palmer Raids of November 1919 and the targeting of the Union of Russian Workers, an anarcho-syndicalist labour union composed of Russian immigrants. On November 8, 700 police raided seventy-three radical centres, arrested more than 500 individuals, and seized tons of literature. Many of those arrested were transported to Ellis Island and deported to Russia on the transport ship, the Buford. Over 3,000 people were deported in 1919, 2,000 in 1920 and over 4,500 in 1921.

Fast-forward to the early 2000s, and the Red Scare has become the Green Scare. In January 2015, one of its primary targets, Eric McDavid, was released from prison after serving almost nine years jail, his conviction the outcome of an FBI entrapment operation. See : Manufacturing Terror: An FBI Informant Seduced Eric McDavid Into a Bomb Plot. Then the Government Lied About It., Trevor Aaronson, Katie Galloway, The Intercept, November 10, 2015. The FBI has also been actively engaged in the infiltration and disruption of other groups, projects and social movements during this period. CrimethInc:

… starting with the entrapment case of Eric McDavid—framed for a single conspiracy charge by an infiltrator who used his attraction to her to manipulate him into discussing illegal actions—the FBI seem to have switched strategies, focusing on younger targets who haven’t actually carried out any actions.

They stepped up this new strategy during the 2008 Republican National Convention, at which FBI informants Brandon Darby and Andrew Darst set up David McKay, Bradley Crowder, and Matthew DePalma on charges of possessing Molotov cocktails in two separate incidents. It’s important to note that the only Molotov cocktails that figured in the RNC protests at any point were the ones used to entrap these young men: the FBI were not responding to a threat, but inventing one.

Over the past month, the FBI have shifted into high gear with this approach. Immediately before May Day, five young men were set up on terrorism charges in Cleveland after an FBI infiltrator apparently guided them into planning to bomb a bridge, in what would have been the only such bombing carried out by anarchists in living memory. During the protests against the NATO summit in Chicago, three young men were arrested and charged with terrorist conspiracy once again involving the only Molotov cocktails within hundreds of miles, set up by at least two FBI informants.

And so on and so forth. To cut a long story short, the fact that the FBI is investigating anTEEfa should surprise no-one. As Ward Churchill has written (“To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy”: The FBI’s Secret War against the Black Panther Party, [PDF], 1988]):

The FBI’s politically repressive activities did not commence during the 1960s, nor did they end with the formal termination of COINTELPRO in 1971. On the contrary, such operations have been sustained for nearly a century, becoming ever more refined, comprehensive and efficient. This in itself implies a marked degradation of whatever genuinely democratic possibilities once imbued “the American experiment,” an effect amplified significantly by the fact that the Bureau has consistently selected as targets those groups which, whatever their imperfections, have been most clearly committed to the realization of egalitarian ideals. All things considered, to describe the resulting sociopolitical dynamic as “undemocratic” would be to fundamentally understate the case. The FBI is and has always been a frankly anti-democratic institution, as are the social, political and economic elements it was created and maintained to protect.

Naturally, anti-fascists organise not only to defeat fascism, but also to combat repression. The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund is one such project, but there are others, and no doubt there’ll be more as the state — increasingly, in close collaboration with the corporate sector — acts to repress dissent.

See also : What Chip Le Grand gets wrogn about the Australian ‘alt-right’ (September 10, 2017) /// Three Way Fight /// Anti-Fascism Beyond the Headlines: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Interviews Mark Bray, LA Review of Books, December 11, 2017.

Now that Yiannopoulos’s tour has ended, antifa in Australia will readjust its sights to homegrown targets …

The risk here is that, in the absence of genuine Nazis to punch, antifa will employ its tactics against people who hold legitimate conservative political views.

Bray, who introduces his book as a “unashamedly partisan call to arms”, defends militant anti-fascism as a “reasonable, historically informed response to the fascist threat”. If that threat in Australia is more perceived [than] real, where does that leave antifa?

Bonus! Aamer

Far-right fringe raises profile by reclaiming immigration debate [John Lyons, The Australian]

johnoliver

[I may add some comments over the course of the next few days …]

Far-right fringe raises profile by reclaiming immigration debate
John Lyons
The Australian
August 8, 2015

When James Gilhome turned on his computer on May 28 he was alarmed by what he saw. Across the following three days, the more he saw the more concerned he became.

Gilhome, although sitting at his home in Tasmania, was watching over social media a plot being hatched: a plan about how to smuggle weapons into an upcoming protest in Melbourne.

Gilhome had joined the newly formed Reclaim Australia movement because he was concerned about Islamic fundamentalism. But somehow he had been included in a discussion by a small Facebook group of supporters from the United Patriots Front, an offshoot of Reclaim Australia and Australia’s newest far-right group.

They were discussing how they could get weapons past police cordons. One idea was to use wheelchairs, as police would assume any metal detectors had been set off by the chair rather than the guns.

“In the conversation, they talked about plans to sneak weapons past police, plans to bring pistols along and plans to provoke the Left into reacting violently, which is exactly what happened,” he tells Inquirer. Gilhome notified police.

As well as Islamic State-inspired terror threats, Australian authorities now have to deal with the so-called “Reclaim Australia” movement. The group, which held rallies in Australian cities last month, formed in February in response to the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney in December last year and the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in January.

But exactly who is involved in Reclaim Australia is hard to discern — some of this obfuscation is deliberate; many of those driving the movement do not want to be identified.

Beneath the surface of Reclaim Australia is a fierce and nasty battle on social media, where threats and counter-threats are traded.

Within Reclaim Australia there are two intense battles taking place: the first is between those who want to protest against Islamic extremism and others, including neo-Nazis, who are trying to make it about Muslims and Jews.

The second is over who runs the movement. As one intelligence source tells Inquirer: “The ideology is there, but so far a leader has not risen through the pack, unlike similar movements in Europe.”

Layered over these internal battles is a larger external struggle between the far Right and the far Left, with members on both sides threatening to reveal the home addresses and personal details of each other.

From some on the Right, or Reclaim, side, Melbourne blogger “Andy Fleming” is public enemy No 1 — except they don’t know who he is.

For 10 years, Fleming — a pseudonym — has been writing about the far Right. Recently, Reclaim Australia activist John Oliver set up a false Facebook account to try to find out. He tells Inquirer he did this because he did not want his real Facebook account to be closed and he knew that anyone trying to out Fleming would have their account closed quickly.

Within 24 hours, Oliver believed he had discovered Fleming’s identity. In response, a call went out — Oliver says it was not from him — for people to “hunt” the person named as Fleming.

One person posted: “Time to go on a good old-fashioned hunt, I reckon. Drag this piece of shit out of his house by his nuts and cut the f..kers off and sew them to his forehead.”

But Oliver’s site had named the wrong person. Police were called to the home of this person who, according to one source, was “terrified” that neo-Nazi vigilantes might turn up on “a good old-fashioned hunt”. Police contacted Oliver and told him of his error.

This is the new world of the far Right in Australia, a world in which online vigilantism is in danger of spilling over into real-life violence. Oliver says he wanted to unmask Fleming because of “the hypocrisy of the Left”. Fleming, maintaining his anonymity, tells Inquirer the emergence of Reclaim Australia has given a significant boost to far-right groups in this country. “Since its emergence at the beginning of 2015, far-right groups have supported Reclaim Australia and it has succeeded in mobilising several thousand people,” he says.

“This mass (of numbers) constitutes a market for far-right ideas and has been viewed as such.”

Fleming says a strategy of the far Right is to identify issues concerning race and nation of concern to a wider public and to try to capitalise on them.

“One of these issues is the place of Islam in Australia,” he says, “which is understood to embody a threat to the health and wellbeing of the Australian nation and which must therefore be eliminated.

“For some on the far Right, the Cronulla ‘riot’ of December 2005 is a touchstone and interpreted as a ‘white civil uprising’. The attitude to ‘multiculturalism’ is generally one of hostility and the policy is understood to be the culprit for a range of social problems, sometimes understood as being religious in nature but just as often ethnic or racial.”

As an illustration of the fear in this shadowy world, the woman who runs Reclaim Australia ref­uses to be identified. She operates on Facebook under the false name Catherine Brennan and identifies herself to the media as “Liz”.

“We personally have dealt with many threats and as the majority of us have families we are not willing to put them at risk,” she tells Inquirer. Liz says she wants to make clear to the Muslim community that the movement is not anti-Islam but anti-Islamic extremism. She is due to meet the Muslim Women’s Association soon to convey this.

Whatever soothing words Liz may speak, reports this week that a Reclaim Australia supporter had been charged with threatening to cut the throat of a prominent Sydney lawyer and campaigner against Islamophobia, Mariam Veiszadeh, will only heighten fear among many Australian Muslims that they are under threat.

The woman who allegedly made the threat, a mother of three, allegedly told Veiszadeh, a “Welcome to Australia ambassador”, that she would “hunt you down”.

An investigation by Inquirer has found that the groups that have gravitated into the Reclaim Australia movement include: Party for Freedom, Squadron 88, United Patriots Front, the Rise Up Australia Party, Q Society, Golden Dawn, One Nation Party, the Australia First Party, the Australian Defence League, Nationalist Alternative, Patriots Defence League of Australia and Restore Australia.

Last week, the Q Society registered the Australian Liberty Alliance, an anti-Islam political party to be launched in Perth on October 20 by Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders, who has called for a ban on the Koran because, he claims, it urges Muslims to kill non-Muslims.

Fleming says Reclaim Australia is a movement driven by social media. “On Facebook there has been a rapid proliferation of pages devoted to alerting the Australian public to the alleged dangers Islam poses to Australia,” he says.

“On my reading there are tens and more likely hundreds of thousands of Australians actively reading and sharing such material on social media.”

According to Fleming, Reclaim Australia has undergone a recomposition during the course of this year, but there are two broad core constituencies: Christian fundamentalists and secular, right-wing ultra-nationalists.

Scores of groups, ranging from neo-Nazi groups to more mainstream groups, are jockeying for a place under the Reclaim Australia umbrella.

Some of the groups are potentially dangerous, says Fleming, “although the question is to whom and what kind of danger”.

“One potential danger is the re-creation of an extra-parliamentary or largely extra-parliamentary radical, right-wing movement, of similar size and shape to parallel movements in parts of Europe.

“The UPF, in particular, has expressed political solidarity with Golden Dawn in Greece and num­erous other European fascist and neo-Nazi parties and projects.

“Reclaim Australia, on the other hand, cleaves to what might otherwise be described as the right wing of the Liberals. The participation of (federal Coalition MP) ­George Christensen in a Reclaim Australia rally in Queensland suggests that there’s a good deal of common ground in the political concerns of segments of RA and those of segments of the LNP.

“The ‘danger’, in this case, is the shift in political debate further to the right and the adoption by establishment figures of some ideas previously relegated to the political margins.”

Many in Reclaim Australia were boosted by the fact a member of the Abbott government had lent support.

Last month, Christensen spoke at a rally in north Queensland and his office says it received “hundreds” of congratulations. His staff member David Westman says there is “massive” support for the movement in Queensland. “It’s the most decisive thing we’ve seen,” he says.

“In the messages we’ve been getting they’re saying things like ‘It’s good that we have got somebody who’s got the balls to say what the rest of us are thinking.’”

Christensen tells Inquirer he decided to address the rally after he read that Legal Aid NSW was training “CALD” — culturally and linguistically diverse — mediators to facilitate culturally specific consent orders that could be signed off before cases reached a Family Court hearing.

One of those mediators is Sheikh Hassim Farache, a lawyer and Sydney imam.

In February, The Point Magazine, an online, federally funded publication, reported: “For Sheikh Hassim Farache, the role of mediators formally recognises what he’s been doing for years: applying sharia to arbitrate family disputes and avoid a long and painful journey through the court system.”

Farache did not return phone calls and Legal Aid NSW tells Inquirer it did not apply sharia law processes or principles.

“All the qualified family dispute resolution practitioners who undertake contractual work for Legal Aid NSW, including Mr Hassim Farache, do so in accordance with principles of the Australian Family Law Act,” a spokeswoman said.

Despite his keenness to address the rally, Christensen says he was worried about some associated groups, specifically the United Patriots Front and Squadron 88.

“But most of the people at the rally I spoke at were cane farmers, sugar-mill workers, teachers, everyday people,” he says.

He did not seek approval from the Prime Minister before he spoke at the rally and had heard nothing from the PM about the rally afterwards.

Tony Abbott declined to answer Inquirer’s questions about Reclaim Australia or Christensen’s attendance.

Instead, his office emailed an interview Abbott did with ABC radio in April in which he said one of the fundamental principles on which Australia was based was “live and let live”.

“Let’s never forget there was quite a lot of ethnic and cultural diversity on the First Fleet because Britain in the late 1700s was a pretty polyglot society,” Abbott said.

“So we were a very diverse country really from the beginning. We weren’t the monochrome Anglo place that is frequently assumed. It is one of the greatest strengths of our country, is our diversity, but it is also our unity in that diversity.”

While the April 4 rallies around the country began the process, it was the rallies on July 18 that raised the stakes; violence broke out at several between Reclaim Australia supporters and those opposing their movement, the worst violence being in Melbourne.

A bus trip from Sydney to Melbourne highlighted the way neo-Nazi elements are trying to infiltrate the Reclaim Australia movement. Just after 9pm on Friday, July 17, a mixed group of activists — including four neo-Nazis — turned up at Sydney’s Central station to board a bus organised by UPF. But police were waiting for them. They sought out Oliver, the man who had tried to reveal the identity of Fleming, who was carrying a gun. Oliver tells Inquirer he had notified the police firearms registry that he was transporting the gun to Melbourne but, nonetheless, police did not want the gun on that bus.

Oliver says he was taking the gun to Melbourne so over that weekend he could combine sports shooting and the rally. “Maybe I made an error of judgment to think that I could do the two things on the one weekend,” he concedes.

But he insists that those in Reclaim Australia are mainstream Australians opposing extremism. He says he was concerned there were four neo-Nazis on the bus. “The first thing I saw when I sat down was the guy in front of me draw a swastika on the mist on the window,” he says. “Two of the neo-Nazis were kicked off in Yass and two made it to Melbourne.”

One of those forced off the bus was Ross “The Skull” May, who has become the figurehead of Squadron 88, Australia’s newest neo-Nazi group.

Squadron 88 draws inspiration from US-based neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which has taken its name from the former Nazi regime’s newspaper, Der Sturmer — The Attacker.

The name gives away its identity — the “8s” stand for the eighth letter of the alphabet — HH, or Heil Hitler. In June, Squadron 88 distributed anti-Semitic leaflets in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

Some of the recent stories on The Daily Stormer’s website make clear the anti-Semitism. The site has a section called “Jewish Problem” and recently included an article headlined “Abraham Lincoln, Jew Lover”, which discussed “Lincoln’s role in paving the way for acceptance and inclusion of Jews in America”.

The publisher of Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin, tells Inquirer he believes the Reclaim Australia rallies began “both because the rate of immigration is rapidly intensifying and because the hordes are becoming increasingly aggressive, both on the media-spectacle level of terrorism and on the personal level of individual interpersonal interactions.
“The same thing is happening in all white countries, at the same time.”

Anglin reacts badly when Inquirer asks how his description of Australia as a white country accorded with the original inhabitants, Aborigines, not being white. “Is that supposed to be a joke?” he replies by email.

He also responds tersely to two other questions.

Inquirer: Given your own country, the US, has had people from all around the world for hundreds of years, in your view are they equal citizens to white Americans?

Anglin: No.

Inquirer: On your website you carry an article about “devious Jew vermin Abe Foxman” — on what do you base your view of Jews as “vermin”.

Anglin: Their behaviour.

The biggest split within the Reclaim Australia movement is between those prepared to allow neo-Nazis to be part of the movement and those who will not.

Fleming says the extent of infiltration of Reclaim Australia by neo-Nazi elements has been “large but not complete”.

“RA has denounced neo-­Nazism and in general it (neo-Nazism) commands little support. This is complicated by the fact that many of RA’s most active promoters are in fact neo-Nazis who have re-cast themselves as simple ‘patriots’ intent on saving Australia from Islam and ‘leftism’, whether these leftist formations are understood as Labor and the Greens or more obscure political formations.”

Nick Folkes, who runs the Party for Freedom, a key group within Reclaim Australia, is one of those campaigning to sideline neo-Nazis. When key figures in Reclaim Australia attended a barbecue at his Sydney home last Sunday someone from Squadron 88 turned up. Folkes denied him entry.

The Party for Freedom grew out of the Australian Protectionist Party. In June 2013, the Sydney branch of the Party for Freedom, run by Folkes, organised a “Torpedo the boats” rally.

“This is the time for patriotic groups to rise up,” Folkes tells Inquirer at his Sydney home.

“I’ve never seen so much anger. The Aussie battler has been totally disconnected. I hope this movement can grow.

“By getting more people involved we can grow an understanding: don’t vote for the major parties.”

Asked to outline the vision of the Reclaim Australia group, he says: “Our vision is to reduce Third World immigration, abandon multiculturalism and bring in assimilation by promoting Australian culture.”

Folkes, an industrial painter, wants governments in Australia to stop funding schools and language and other programs for migrants.

He insists he is not racist — “I’m married to a Japanese woman” — and argues that Asian countries would not allow the levels of immigration Australia does.

While he considers carefully his language during our interview, the language of the party’s brochures is emotive: “The ‘Aussie dream’ has been shattered due to the greed of government, foreign speculators and invaders who are colluding to ethnically cleanse suburbs of Australian families.”

As is common to most of these far-right groups, Muslims are a prime target. The party’s website states: “A rough estimate shows that close to half of all Muslims in the world are inbred.”

Attached is a photo of a semi-naked girl born horribly deformed, with as many as five legs, under a headline:

“Muslim Inbreeding: Impacts on intelligence, sanity, health and society.”

The article states: “Massive inbreeding within the Muslim culture during the last 1400 years may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool.”

Challenged about this material, Folkes concedes: “I like to use the articles or images that are most politically incorrect.”

He wants his and other “patriotic parties” to take the place of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which, he says, had sound policies but poor management.

The Party of Freedom’s “10-point plan to save Australia” is: Stop our genocide by stopping the Third World invasion, abolish the divisive state-sanctioned policy of multiculturalism, deport foreign nationals on welfare and foreign criminals in our jails, abolish the Human Rights Commission to protect free speech, cease all taxpayer funding of Islamic schools or mosques, deport all asylum-seekers and remove Australia from the UNHCR protocol on refugees, end all foreign aid, abolish 457 visas for temporary workers, restrict foreign ownership of Australians homes, farms and land, and promote Australian values, culture and assimilation.

The party is preparing to run candidates at the next federal election and will campaign on concerns among Australians about the high cost of housing, blaming this on “the Chinese real estate invasion.”

Its website says: “Australia is under attack from greedy foreign intruders who are rapidly acquiring Australian residential property pricing locals out of the market.

“Aussie battlers are being pushed to the fringes of our cities while foreign intruders are reaping the benefits of hard working previous generations.”

The website continues: “The new disposed or forgotten people will one day be remembered as the ‘stolen generation’ priced out of the market by invading overseas Chinese colonising our suburbs and cities.”

Another of the groups behind the rallies is the United Patriots Front, which describes itself as “a nationwide movement opposing the spread of left-wing treason and spread of Islamism”.

Some people monitoring Reclaim Australia are concerned about the lack of public statements by political leaders condemning the hardline elements.

Far-right watcher Fleming says: “I believe that political leaders play an important role in shaping the political context in which RA operates, and a failure to address its ideology is read by RA’s supporters as giving them licence to carry on their crusade against Islam.”

Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane says: “I’m surprised more hasn’t been said by political leaders to date.”