When far-right leaders from Europe attended an anti-Semitism conference in Jerusalem this week, it made headlines. Their parties have roots in Holocaust denial and Nazi collaboration – yet they were welcomed at an event aimed at fighting anti-Semitism.
The summit became a flashpoint. Several Jewish leaders, including Britain’s Chief Rabbi, pulled out in protest. But the far-right presence wasn’t a diplomatic misstep. It reflects a wider shift.
Among the delegates were Jordan Bardella, president of France’s National Rally (RN) – formerly the National Front, founded by Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen – Marion Maréchal Le Pen, niece of RN figurehead Marine Le Pen, and Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik.
In response, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy cancelled their appearances, the Times of Israel reported. Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and the UK government’s anti-Semitism adviser, John Mann, also withdrew.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed, author of Alt Reich, told RFI that far-right movements across Europe and the US are deliberately rebranding. By aligning with Israel, he said, they aim to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism and gain political legitimacy – while continuing to push exclusionary, ethno-nationalist agendas.
RFI: Why are far-right politicians aligning themselves with Israel – a state founded after the Holocaust – when their political roots are openly anti-Semitic?
Nafeez Ahmed: There are some tactical alliances here, where they may have fundamental disagreements about where they stand on Jewish people. But they agree that they have a common enemy, which is the liberal idea of a multi-ethnic, multicultural society.
And they're saying: “If Israel is trying to create an ethno-nationalist state where they are expelling a particular group, the Palestinians, then that is an interesting model that we should learn from.”
After the comprehensive defeat of the Nazis in World War II and the emergence of a post-war architecture, it was not fashionable anymore to identify as a Nazi.
They began to realise that they have a shared ideology, that converges despite their differences
REMARK by Nafeez Ahmed
So a lot of these movements went underground and attempted to reframe themselves. And some Nazi organisations and white supremacist groups began to masquerade as if they were against Nazis.
This became a defining tactic of the post-war era, where you had Nazis who harboured deep anti-Semitic sentiments needing to find a new way to mobilise and gain public support by calling themselves anti-racist and anti-Nazi.
Many far-right groups have attempted to deliberately ally themselves with the state of Israel in order to demonstrate how opposed to anti-Semitism they are, and to reinforce this idea that they are not racist and they are completely opposed to the Nazi ideology. But this is really a tactical shift.
Many of these groups to this day continue to flirt with pro-Nazi organisations and promote ideas that are divisive, not just against migrants or Muslim groups or black communities, but also affecting Jewish communities.
RFI: How does this play out in France?
Nafeez Ahmed: Marine Le Pen is the head of a party with historical roots in Nazism. The National Rally, previously the National Front, was a Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic party, which was historically very sympathetic to the Nazis. There is evidence of collaboration with the Nazis.
Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a repeated Holocaust denier and made multiple anti-Semitic statements. But open support for Nazi ideology was simply not popular in France.
It prevented his party from gaining ground in elections. So Marine Le Pen moved away from what was understood to be a losing approach. She very concertedly said: "We are against Nazis, we are allied with Israel, we are opposed to anti-Semitism" while focusing on migrants, Muslims, and other communities where they felt that they could gain traction.
Anti-Semitic hate trial opens for French far-right veteran Jean-Marie Le Pen
RFI: Your book, Alt Reich, deals with the growth of extreme right political parties and movements in the West, and you describe a growing network of these groups that increasingly influence policymaking as a whole. What motivated you to investigate this?
Nafeez Ahmed: I have been tracking many of these extremist groups for over a decade. I began to see some of these patterns and recognise that there were these lines of communication between some of these groups that were very disturbing. One of the consistent themes that I began to see was the role of Nazi-inspired "eugenics" ideology becoming more mainstream.
I was looking at quite mainstream groups in Britain. One of them is the Free Speech Union, a right-wing pressure group with many distinguished people on their advisory council, who are involved in mainstream publications like The Telegraph, like The Spectator. They're involved in many other parts of society, like the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
But the person who founded the group, Toby Young, openly talks about ideas which were inspired by scientific racism. He was even appointed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to an advisory role in the government, but there was outrage about it and he ended up having to resign.
But it shows that he had a certain traction and a certain impact on mainstream conservative thinking. He was quoting individuals that were receiving money from the Pioneer Fund [a US foundation of which the original mandate was to pursue race betterment].
I wanted to bring this process into public consciousness so more people could become aware that this is not happening by accident, that the very strange and bizarre things that we're seeing happening on an almost daily basis now is actually part of an evolving strategy.
RFI: That sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory
Nafeez Ahmed: It's not a conspiracy. It's a networked effect. It's an evolving strategy – not even a coherent one, but nevertheless a strategy. And one of the end goals of it is to deliberately destroy and erode the fundamentals of democracy in order to pursue this agenda, which is ultimately about empowering a tiny minority of people who tend to identify as white and superior.
RFI: In the United States Project 2025, developed by the Heritage Foundation, sets out goals like removing protections against anti-LGBTQ discrimination and scrapping diversity programmes. These ideas were published two years ago and trace back to the group’s writings in the 1970s. Why didn’t the Democratic Party and the American left take these signs more seriously?
Nafeez Ahmed: I think the reason that the signs were not seen is because there has been a lack of understanding of how pro-Nazi organisations and white supremacist groups deliberately attempted to reframe [their ideas].
For instance, the Pioneer Fund, set up in the 1930s in New York had very close ties to eugenicists in Nazi Germany. People don't realise how this organisation attempted to infiltrate and subvert mainstream parties from the very beginning. They established very close ties to the Republican Party at that time. They mobilised on an anti-civil rights front. Several Pioneer Fund members were recruited into the Heritage Foundation.
They also began to repackage their ideas. A turning point was the publication of The Bell Curve, a work by Charles Murray, an American social scientist, which is known as the Bible of scientific racism.
But he carefully removed the origins of that research from public visibility by writing his book and repackaging it and making it legitimate.
And he went on to influence many other conservative foundations across the UK and Europe, as well as the United States.
I think we've all been caught off guard.
