UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Hussein released a statement slamming “populists, demagogues and political fantasists” and compared the propaganda tactics used by US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage to those of ISIS terrorists.
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While al-Hussein mentioned Trump and Farage, along with leaders like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Czech President Milos Zeman, Austrian politician Norbert Hofer, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and French nationalist politician Marine Le Pen, the main target of his speech was Dutch anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders.
During the inauguration of the Hague-based Peace, Justice and Security foundation Hussein said, “I am a Muslim, who is, confusingly to racists, also white-skinned; whose mother is European and father, Arab”.
A top United Nations official has launched a broad attack on a mix of U.S. and European politicians, beginning with Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and progressing as far as Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, while covertly comparing them to Islamic State terrorists.
“All seek in varying degrees to recover a past, halcyon and so pure in form, where sunlit fields are settled by peoples united by ethnicity or religion”, Zeid told prominent members of the justice community.
Trump, a controversial real estate mogul, is well-known for his calls to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico as well as to ban all Muslims from the United States. Mr Zeid labelled Mr Wilders’ March 2017 election platform, which calls for no Muslim immigrants, the closing of mosques and the banning of the Quran, as “grotesque”. A past that most certainly, in reality, did not exist anywhere, ever, “he was quoted as saying by the BBC”.
“The formula is simple: make people, already nervous, feel bad, and then emphasize it’s all because of a group, lying within, foreign and menacing”, he said. Wilders of “weaponizing” xenophobia and bigotry. “In its mode of communication, its use of half-truths and oversimplification, the propaganda of Daesh uses tactics similar to those of the populists”, Hussein said.
“I do not equate the actions of nationalist demagogues with those of Daesh, which are monstrous and sickening”, Zeid said, using another name for Isis.
“We hear of accelerating discrimination in workplaces”.
Mr Hussein warned that the atmosphere “thick with hate” could quickly descend into “colossal violence”.
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“Are we going to continue to stand by and observe this banalisation of bigotry, until it reaches its logical conclusion?” “And we, not you, will write and sculpt this coming century”, he said.
