Savvas Michael-Matsas, leader of a small radical-left party, went on trial in Greece Sept. 3, charged with "libellous defamation," "incitement to violence and civil discord" and "disturbing the public peace" in a case brought by members of the far-right Golden Dawn [9] party. Michael-Matsas' Revolutionary Workers' Party (EEK [10]) has a slogan of "The people don't forget, they hang fascists." Michael-Matsas himself had publicly boasted: "I'm the embodiment of every fascist's fantasy. I'm a Jew, a communist—and a heretical communist, a Trotskyist, at that. I don't fit anywhere. The only thing I happen not to be is homosexual." Co-defendant Konstantinos Moutzouris, a former rector of Athens Polytechnic, stands accused of allowing progressive news website Athens Indymedia [11] to use the university's server.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, former Golden Dawn candidate Themis Skordeli, was charged in a stabbing attack on an Afghan immigrant in September 2011. Her trial has been postponed eight times. The MP Ilias Panagiotaros, another of the complainants, owns a shop called Phalanga (Greek rendering of Falange, a name used by far-right paramilitary movements in Spain [12], Lebanon [13], Bolivia [14] and elsewhere) that sells street-fighting paraphernalia; he told the BBC [15] last year that Greece is heading for civil war.
Michael-Matsas' friend Maria Margaronis, in commentary for The Guardian, charges that he was targeted by Golden Dawn in part because he is Jewish: "[P]icking out the Jew to be the first to walk the plank is sleazy beyond belief, a cheap sop to the fascist gallery. As one of the few Jewish public intellectuals in Greece, Savvas has long been targeted by neo-Nazi websites, with slogans like 'Crush the Jewish worm' and claims that he can be found lurking under every stone, fomenting civil war among pure-blooded Greeks in order to establish a Judeo-Bolshevik state. He has also been accused of being both an agent of Iran and a fully paid-up member of the international Zionist conspiracy (in fact he's a fierce anti-Zionist)." (Enet English [16], Ha'aretz [17], Sept. 3; The Guardian [18], Sept. 1)
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