UNITED NATIONS, Dec 20 (NNN-XINHUA) – UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, warned that, far-right ideology is the major source of terrorism in Western countries.
“It has been demonstrated that, the biggest threat of terrorism today in Western countries comes from the extreme right, neo-Nazism and white supremacy,” he told an end-of-year press conference, at the UN Headquarters in New York.
“And I think we must be very clear and very firm in condemning every form of neo-Nazism and white supremacism, any form of anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred that we are seeing multiplied in Western societies, and also in other parts of the world. This is clearly a threat, and we must fight that threat with enormous determination,” he said.
The far-right coup attempts, to overthrow the German government, are just one of the examples of the threat to democratic societies around the world, he said.
There is a particular responsibility of social media platforms, to preserve the freedom of the press and, at the same time, to avoid hate speech and forms of extremism, said Guterres. “And I would be particularly shocked, if we would see the freedom of the press being threatened, journalists not being allowed to do their work, at the same time, hate speech proliferating.”
Whoever owns any social media platform should make sure that the freedom of expression, especially of journalists, is respected and that hate speech, neo-Nazism, white supremacism, and other forms of extremism, do not find their way through those social platforms, he said.– NNN-XINHUA
