They descended by the hundreds – black-shirted, bat-wielding youths chasing down dark-skinned immigrants through the streets of Athens and beating them senseless in an unprecedented show of force by Greece’s far-right extremists.

In Greece, alarm is rising that the twin crises of financial meltdown and soaring illegal immigration are creating the conditions for a right-wing rise – and the recent massacre in Norway drove authorities to beef up security on Monday.

The move comes amid spiraling social unrest that has unleashed waves of rioting and vigilante thuggery on the streets of Athens. The U.N.’s refugee agency warns that some Athens neighborhoods have become zones where “fascist groups have established an odd lawless regime.”

Greek police on Monday said they have increased security checks at Muslim prayer houses and other immigrant sites in response to the Norway shooting rampage that claimed 77 lives. “There has been an increase in monitoring at these sites since the events occurred in Norway,” said police spokesman Thanassis Kokkalakis.

The xenophobic rage exploded in May, when youths rampaged through a heavily immigrant neighborhood in broad daylight, knifing and beating foreigners. The attacks left at least 25 people hospitalized with stab wounds or severe beatings. Athens has since suffered a spate of hate attacks by far-rightists.

Last November, the leader of a neo-Nazi group won a seat on Athens’ city council, with an unprecedented 5.3 percent of the vote.

The UNHCR warns of daily attacks by fascist groups in central Athens. “There has been a dangerous escalation in phenomena of racist violence targeting indiscriminately aliens, based solely on their skin color or country of origin,” the UNHCR wrote in a June report. “In certain areas of Athens, cruel and criminal attacks are nearly a daily phenomenon staged by fascist groups that have established an odd lawless regime.”

“I receive threats all the time,” Naim Elgandour, the Egyptian-born head of the Muslim Association of Greece, said in an interview. “Things have gotten much worse lately. It’s an alarm bell from the rest for Europe,” he said. “There may be 5,000 hardcore extremists in Athens, by they are gaining sympathy and tolerance by the day.”

Elgandour said at least 10 makeshift mosques – basements and coffee shops converted by immigrants to use as prayer sites – have been damaged in firebomb and vandalism attacks in the past year.

Since winning a seat on Athens City Council, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, head of the violent far-right group Golden Dawn, has tailored his recent rhetoric to the financial crisis.

“We are living in an enslaved country, financially and nationally,” Michaloliakos, a 54-year-old mathematician, told supporters last month, giving a speech under a statue of Alexander the Great.

“We have a bankrupt economy and the thieving politicians responsible go unpunished,” he said. “How long do they think they can keep lying and fooling the Greek people? Whether they like it or not, the hour of Golden Dawn and nationalist revolution is coming.”

Associated Press, 2 August 2011 

Unknown arsonists set fire to a makeshift mosque in Athens early on Sunday, causing damage but no injuries, police said.

The arsonists broke a window of the ground-floor flat used for religious practices in the district of Kallithea around 2:00 am SA time and threw incendiaries inside, a police source told AFP. Greek news reports said a Nazi swastika was painted on the flat’s windows.

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A wave of violent attacks against immigrants by suspected right-wing extremists has put Muslims and the police on alert in rundown parts of Athens with burgeoning migrant populations.

Immigrants have been beaten and stabbed near central squares, and several makeshift mosques have been burned and vandalized. In the most grievous attack, at the end of October, the assailants locked the door of a basement prayer site and hurled firebombs through the windows, seriously wounding four worshipers.

“The attacks are constant – I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Naim Elghandour, who moved to Athens from Egypt in the 1970s and now heads the Muslim Association of Greece. “I used to be treated like an equal. Now I’m getting death threats.”

Tensions in neglected, crime-ridden parts of Athens with growing immigrant communities have been mounting over the past two years. Highlighting expanding public discontent, the extreme right-wing group Chrysi Avgi, or “Golden Dawn”, won its first ever seat on the Athens City Council in local elections three weeks ago. The group mustered strong support in working-class neighborhoods in the capital and elsewhere in Greece by describing migrants as a drain on the economy, which is reeling from a debt crisis, and calling for immediate deportations.

The Greek news media linked the group to the violence after a spray-painted cross merged with a circle – a symbol used by extreme rightists worldwide – was found on the wall of a firebombed prayer site.

New York Times, 1 December 2010

Dozens of far-right activists and local residents threw eggs and taunted hundreds of Muslim immigrants as they gathered to pray in a central square for Eid al-Adha surrounded by a protective cordon of riot police.

Greece, which has become the main immigrant gateway to the European Union, has a growing Muslim community and tensions between locals and incomers have run high in some Athens areas such as Attiki square, the scene of Tuesday’s incident.

Athens’ Muslim community is without an official mosque and prayers are usually held at cultural centers or community halls or private apartments around the city. The Muslim community in Greece is estimated at about 1 million, in a country where most people are Greek Orthodox Christians.

While the Muslims prayed, some locals shouted obscenities from their balconies and waved Greek flags. Leaflets that depicted pigs – an animal Muslims consider unclean – were scattered across the square.

“There is a (unofficial) mosque near here but we’re afraid to go there,” said a 30-year old migrant from Bangladesh, who gave his name as Shamasul. “Sometimes Greeks in the neighborhood threaten to kill us.”

Margarita Vassilatou, 56, who has lived in the square for more than 35 years said she wanted to leave as a result of the immigrants: “This is not a life … We are afraid of them. Many of them are criminals, they carry knifes and deal drugs.”

In another, more central square in front of Athens university, about 2,000 Muslim men and women prayed peacefully in front of the neo-classical university and ancient Greek statues.

In the past, moves to build a mosque in the capital have been met with opposition from local residents and some priests of the Greek orthodox church. However, the current archbishop supports the construction of a mosque and the socialist government has set aside a site close to the city center, although building has not yet begun.

The only mosques in Greece are in the northeastern region of Xanthi near the Turkish border, home to a large Muslim minority.

Reuters, 16 November 2010