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Austria Tag

Hotel Kaiserwasser and Hotel Regina in Vienna, Austria, have canceled a BDS event by a British-Palestinian lawyer. News agency Heute.at reported that Hotel Kaiserwasser canceled the event due to charges of antisemitism and one employee received threats by the Jewish community. Some have disputed this:
“Nonsense,” said Raimund Fastenbauer, general-secretary of the 7,000-member Vienna Jewish community, adding that he informed the hotel about the “antisemitic character of BDS” movement targeting the Jewish state. The Hotel said it canceled the event due to “operational unfeasability,” according to Heute.at. Fastenbauer told the news site, “Nazis demanded, ‘Don’t buy from Jews,’ BDS formulates the [Nazi] demand in a similar way today.”

The push back against the progressive left's agenda that culminated in the election of President-elect Trump had been gaining steam for a while now and not just on this side of the Atlantic. Faced with poor economic growth, an influx of refugees, a sense of losing their national identity, and a variety of country-specific reasons, the entire Western world seems on the verge of the same sort of election-revolution we just witnessed in America. Heralded as the "the liberal West's last defender," Angela Merkel has been under intense pressure based on her open door policy to refugees, and she now finds herself feeling the growing dissatisfaction of the German people even more powerfully than before Trump's victory.

“Anti-Semitic, homophobic and sympathising with Jihad.” This is how a leading Austrian newspaper summed up the latest study looking into the attitudes of young Muslims living in the city of Vienna. The study commissioned by the city reveals that nearly one-third of the Muslim youth living in the Austrian capital hold radical Islamic views and support armed Jihad against the West. The leftist coalition running the city attacked the findings of the study that yet again reveal the clutching hold of Islamism over Europe’s migrant Muslim population. The study also exposes the failure of Multiculturalism, a policy pursued for decades by Social Democrats and ecological Green Party, who run the Austrian capital.

The current Austrian presidential election is filled with more drama than America's election cycle, if you can believe that. Independent presidential candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, backed by the Green Party, barely beat Freedom Party candidate Norbert Hofer in May in an election that came down to the mail-in ballots. However, Austria's highest court overturned the election results in July when the justices noticed problems with mail ballots affecting, "nearly 78,000 votes - more than twice the margin separating the two candidates." As a result, a runoff election was scheduled for October 2. That election has recently been delayed and for an all too familiar reason -- mail-in ballots.

Austria's highest court ruled for a do-over of the presidential election runoff after it found discrepancies in the mail ballots. The mail-in ballots made former Green Party chief Alexander Van der Bellen president with 50.3% of the vote over Freedom Party candidate Norbert Hofer. Constitutional Court head Gerhart Holzinger said the court noted "that the irregularities affected nearly 78,000 votes — more than twice the margin separating the two candidates." From Reuters: