Austrian authorities have seized a large cache of weapons and ammunition that were intended to be sold to far-right extremists in Germany.

Police raids in recent days led to the seizure of 70 automatic and semi-automatic firearms, more than 100,000 rounds of ammunition and explosives, officials said.

The main suspect is a 53-year-old Austrian, interior minister Karl Nehammer said.

Mr Nehammer said the police operations had uncovered “a network that shows links between the area of right-wing extremism and organised crime”.

He said that some of those belonged to “the neo-Nazi scene that have sadly also been known in Austria for a while”.

The firearms were allegedly bought with the proceeds from the sale of drugs.

Read More: Teenager Inspired by Anders Brevik convicted in the U.K.

A second Austrian student fraternity has a songbook containing anti-Semitic lyrics making fun of the Holocaust and insulting Jews, a newspaper said on Tuesday, three weeks after it exposed a similar case that forced a far-right politician to quit.

The earlier case reported by Falter prompted the resignation of a prominent member of the anti-Islam Freedom Party (FPO), which became the junior partner in conservative Chancellor Christian Kurz’s government in December following elections.

Austria is the only western European country to have a far-right party in government.

Last month, left-wing weekly Falter reported on anti-Semitic lyrics in a songbook published by a student fraternity in Lower Austria, the province surrounding Vienna. That fraternity’s deputy leader was the FPO’s top candidate in an election for the regional parliament there, Udo Landbauer.

Landbauer eventually stepped down over the affair. After initially refusing to sack him, the party later said it was setting up a committee of historians that would examine its past and that of right-wing fraternities like Landbauer’s, which are often close to the FPO but not formally part of it.

On Tuesday, Falter reported that another fraternity, Bruna Sudetia based in Vienna, had a similar songbook, and that the head of that group is on the staff of FPO Infrastructure Minister Norbert Hofer.

The staffer, Herwig Goetschober, who works on social media, was not immediately available for comment. A spokesman for Hofer said Goetschober was sick but denied knowing of the lyrics published by Falter, adding that his songbook had a different content and layout.

“He has no knowledge of this other songbook. He also does not know who produced it,” the spokesman said.

The FPO says it has abandoned its neo-Nazi past and rejects anti-Semitism. It now focuses its criticism on Islam and even openly courts Jewish voters.

But the main group representing Austria’s tiny Jewish community, the IKG, says the FPO has done too little to address the long-standing anti-Semitism within its ranks. It sees fraternities as a breeding ground for the problem.

The IKG has also questioned whether the FPO’s historical commission will get to the bottom of anti-Semitism within fraternities. Many senior political party figures belong to a fraternity but the FPO has said it cannot force those organisations to cooperate with the commission.

“If it is true that the FPO cannot control the fraternities, then that probably confirms that fraternity members control the FPO,” IKG chief Oskar Deutsch told ORF radio at the weekend.

Europeans in a number of countries are seeking to arm themselves with guns and self-defence devices in growing numbers following a series of attacks by militants and the mentally ill.

Some weapons sellers also link their increased business to the arrival of huge numbers of migrants in Europe, although a German police report stated that the vast majority do not commit crimes of any kind in the country.

The picture is patchy, with no up-to-date data available at a European level, leaving national and regional authorities to release statistics that are far from comprehensive and not always comparable. Reasons also vary for civilians to own guns legally, including hunting and sport as well as self-protection.

Nevertheless, applications for gun permits are climbing in Switzerland, Austria and the Czech Republic. Their larger neighbour Germany has not followed the trend in lethal firearms, but permits for carrying devices designed to scare off assailants, such as blank guns and those that fire pepper spray, have risen almost 50 percent.

FACTBOX on trends in weapons permits:

Little research into the reasons for the recent apparent trend has yet been published, but the assumption is that attacks in the past year including in Paris, Brussels, Nice and Munich have stirred fear among some citizens.

“There’s no official explanation for the rise, but in general we see a connection to Europe’s terrorist attacks,” said Hanspeter Kruesi, a police spokesman in the Swiss canton of St. Gallen.

Kruesi advised against buying weapons, saying they did little to improve citizens’ security while presenting problems over safe storage and raising legal questions over their proper use in a conflict. “People could actually make themselves criminally liable,” he said.

After he spoke to Reuters, the canton was the scene of an attack aboard a train this month. The suspect and a woman victim died later, although police said his motive was unclear.

One Swiss resident who has just bought his first ever weapons – a pistol and a pump-action shotgun – pinned his decision on a feeling of insecurity created by the attacks combined with criminality that he blamed on north Africans, as well as concern over recent break-ins in his neighbourhood.

“Buying weapons for self-defence won’t protect you from terrorist attacks,” said the 55-year-old who lives in a town near the capital, Bern.

“Nevertheless these attacks are contributing to a subjective sense of threat, as is the rising pressure from migration and the high crime rate among migrants from the Maghreb,” he said, requesting anonymity due to concerns about his safety.

Figures are hard to come by on whether the rate of crime, serious or petty, is higher among migrants than the general population in Europe.

The report from the BKA federal police in Germany – where more than a million people fleeing violence and poverty arrived last year – said migrants committed or tried to commit about 69,000 crimes in the first quarter of 2016. However, it did not say how this compared with the overall number of crimes.

‘THE SUM OF THESE EVENTS’

Like Kruesi, authorities in Europe – where levels of gun ownership are comparatively low and controls are often tight – have avoided encouraging their citizens to buy weapons.

But Czech President Milos Zeman broke ranks after an 18-year-old with a history of mental illness killed nine people in Munich in July. “Citizens should be able to arm themselves … in order to be able to act against these terrorists,” he told TV Nova.

Czechs may already be doing so. Gun permit holders grew by almost 6,000 to close to 300,000 in the first five months of 2016 after several years of declines.

In Switzerland, the land of the legendary crossbow marksman William Tell, a rising trend emerged last year. Of the country’s 26 cantons, the 12 that responded to a Reuters inquiry all reported higher 2015 applications for permits entitling people to buy guns. Interim 2016 figures show a further rise.

While those from people with serious criminal convictions or suffering from mental illness are rejected, most are granted.

“Nobody says directly: I’m buying a gun because of the attacks in Nice or Munich,” said Daniel Wyss, president of the Swiss weapons dealers’ association who runs his own gun shop. “But the sum of these events has fostered a general feeling of vulnerability.”

Switzerland’s defence relies heavily on tens of thousands of citizen soldiers who store their automatic rifles at home, but almost no civilians have the right to carry loaded guns in public.

Some people want this changed. Jean-Luc Addor, a parliamentarian and member of the Swiss gun lobby, aims to introduce legislation in September to ease the restrictions.

Addor contends that more armed civilians mean safer streets. “The state is not equipped to guarantee public safety,” he said. “Sometimes citizens – not every citizen, but those who have appropriate training – should be given means to protect themselves and their families.”

AN EROSION OF TRUST?

Suggestions that governments might be falling short in their duties have also surfaced in Germany.

Ingo Meinhard, head of the German association of gunsmiths and specialist gun dealers, said demand for blank guns and pepper spray jumped after sexual assaults on women at New Year in the city of Cologne. These were blamed largely on migrants.

Meinhard said demand subsequently fell off but rose again after three fatal attacks in July, including by an Islamic State sympathiser who detonated a bomb near a German music festival. “We’re now noticing high demand in urban areas,” he added.

Police drew heavy criticism for failing to prevent the Cologne incidents, since which an Iraqi and an Algerian have been convicted of sexual assault.

German permits for firearms possession have fallen marginally in the past year, while those for scare devices jumped 49 percent in the year to June to 402,301.

No permit is required for pepper spray aerosols marketed as a protection against animals such as aggressive dogs, though officials say anyone who uses them on humans could get into trouble with the law.

Dagmar Ellerbock, a history professor at Technische Universitaet Dresden, said the New Year incidents may have prompted Germans to question the authorities’ competence.

“This trend towards self-defence could be a reason to worry if it signals an erosion of trust, that citizens who experienced the assaults in Cologne no longer feel safe or protected by the state,” she said.

Gun sellers said weapons interest grew in Austria after large numbers of migrants arrived in the country at the northern end of the now closed ‘Balkan Route’. “Fear is very much a driving force,” said Robert Siegert, a gun maker and the weapons trade spokesman at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce “That’s what we keep hearing from salespeople in shops.”

AMERICAN MINDSET

Gun ownership remains low in Europe. According to the Geneva-based group Small Arms Survey, the United States easily surpasses the continent in per capita terms.

There are over 100 guns per 100 U.S. residents, more than twice the figure for Switzerland and three times that for Austria, Germany and France.

France requires background checks for those seeking a weapon for the two purposes it considers legitimate: hunting or joining a shooting club. This scrutiny can take more than a year.

Consequently, it is unlikely that legal French gun ownership has changed much since 2015, said Thierry Coste, secretary general of the Comité Guillaume Tell (William Tell) lobby group.

“Gun ownership is extremely regulated, getting there is like an obstacle course,” he said. “We don’t have the same mindset as Americans.”

Gun control laws in Britain, which has also experienced a number of Islamist militant attacks in recent years, have been strict since a school massacre in 1996. Licensed firearms numbers in England and Wales have remained relatively stable in the past year.

Even in the self-defence business, some doubt the benefits of a personal arsenal. Marco Schnyder, who runs a training centre in Zurich, said knowing how to restrain an assailant was better.

“I have people in my shooting classes who want to protect their families or themselves,” he said. “They would be better served getting a watchdog or an alarm system. I tell them that, too.”

The leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on Tuesday, laying a wreath under the engraved names of towns in Austria from where Jews were expelled by the Nazis.

He said anti-Semitism had no place in his party and urged a common front against Islamists.

Strache’s party, which last year expelled a member of its parliamentary group for anti-Semitic comments, has sought to redress the worst of its past while retaining popular support with outspoken opposition to Muslim migration.

During his visit, Strache kept a Fedora hat firmly on his head as a sign of respect and declined to answer questions. But afterwards he explained why he was visiting Yad Vashem’s Valley of the Communities, where the names of 5,000 towns and cities where Jews once lived are listed on monumental stone walls.

“For us, it’s important to act against anti-Semitism and also against Islamism and terrorism and to discuss the issues we have in common,” he told Reuters by telephone. “Anti-Semitism often emerges anew from Islamism and from the left.”

The Israeli foreign ministry said it had nothing to do with Strache’s visit and the Austrian embassy in Tel Aviv also said it was not involved. Strache said he was invited by Likud, the right-wing party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We have a lot in common,” Strache said of Likud. “I always say, if one defines the Judeo-Christian West, then Israel represents a kind of border. If Israel fails, Europe fails. And if Europe fails, Israel fails.”

Michael Kleiner, a Likud party member and a former lawmaker, confirmed to Israel’s Army Radio that Strache had been invited by his party and said he was a friend of Israel.

RISING FORCE

Strache, 46, is a rising political force in Austria. His the Freedom Party won 20 percent of the vote in the small Alpine republic’s last elections in 2013. In some recent polls its support has been put at as much as 30 percent.

Strache, who failed in a bid to become mayor of Vienna last year, has himself been accused of anti-Semitism in the past.

In 2012, he was vilified over a cartoon posted on his Facebook page that depicted a fat banker with a hooked nose and six-pointed star buttons on his sleeve. The banker was gorging himself at the expense of a thin man representing “the people”.

Austrian President Heinz Fischer called it “the low point of political culture which deserves to be universally and roundly condemned”. Strache denied being anti-Semitic and has since repeatedly denounced anti-Semitism.

The memorial Strache visited on Tuesday is a poignant reminder of the impact of persecution on a race. Asked what thoughts this prompted about the displacement of Muslims, he said the two could not be compared.

“Every time people are driven away from their homes it’s dramatic,” he said, mentioning the threat from Islamic State insurgents in Syria and Iraq. “All of us in the western-liberal, Judeo-Christian community with common values must stand up against this inhumanity.”

 (Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla in Vienna; Editing by Jeremy Gaunt/Mark Heinrich)

Vandals daubed swastikas and anti-migrant slogans on Muslim and Jewish graves over the weekend in western Austria.

The perpetrators targeted the graves and building of a Jewish cemetery in the town of Hohenems, near the Swiss border. Police sources confirmed that swastikas appeared on its walls.

Swastikas and racist graffiti also appeared at a Muslim cemetery in the nearby municipality of Altach.

Police are linking this case to an earlier spate of vandalism against a refugee hostel and Jewish museum two weeks ago. Swastikas appeared on walls of the Jewish district, including the Jewish museum. The phrase “Stop the asylum flood” appeared on a refugee hostel.

Hohenems mayor, Richard Amman, had recently received a letter from far-right extremists. He is also in a legal battle over the disputed mayoral elections with a candidate from the far-right Freedom Party (FPO). The FPO had claimed victory with 43.3 per cent; but a runoff secured Amman’s election with the smallest of margins.

Back in Feburary, swastikas were daubed on the walls of a Vienna mosque,  as Austria prepared for its official Pegida-inspired march. Other recent incidents of Islamophobia and antisemitsm in Austria included an assault on two Jewish men, which included shouts of “Scheissjuden” (“Shitty Jews”).

The post Vandals daub swastikas and racist slogans on Jewish and Muslim graves in Austria appeared first on Religious Reader.