International Jewish Community: "Croatian Fascism Rears its Ugly Face"

International Jewish Community: "Croatian Fascism Rears its Ugly Face"

Namely, this week the Croatian weekly Express published the faces of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Italian soon-to-be Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán with Hitler mustaches under the headline "Achtung Croatia between Three Mini-Fascisms."

While these three politicians are indeed right-wing conservatives, to brand them as Nazis is simply a disgusting and unfair description, which is in extremely poor taste and an insult to the victims of the Nazis.

In a separate incident in Australia, a rowdy crowd of Croatian supporters of the Sydney United football club gave Nazi salutes and sang “Za Dom Spremni, (For the Homeland ready), the Croatian equivalent of the Nazi salute of “Sieg Heil,” during a “Welcome to the land” ceremony, which acknowledges the fact that the lands on which the stadium was built originally belonged to the Aborigines, it is said in the statement.

Both incidents reflect the deep-seated fascism prevalent in Croatia and among Diaspora Croatian communities. According to Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center’s Director of Eastern European Affairs, such manifestations are not surprising.

“Since the breakup of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the Croatian state, with few exceptions the government has not sufficiently emphasized the criminal nature of the Independent State of Croatia and the horrific crimes by the Ustasha movement, which governed the country and sought to destroy the Serb, Jewish, and Roma communities”, Dr. Zuroff concluded.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400.000 member families in the United States.