It was on a Wednesday evening, a day before the Hanau shooting in Germany, that I decided to meet with a group of people who want to ‘save’ Vienna, my hometown, from people like me: a daughter of immigrants, ethnically non-white, and Muslim. So, I visited gatherings organized by the Identitarian movement in Austria. This is a notorious fascist group, whose leader I refuse to name but has gained notoriety after receiving money from the Christchurch shooter. For the sake of this article, I will refer to this leader as Thomas. These events were advertised online as part of an nascent movement to help with new recruits. However, the attendees referred to it as IB (Identitäre Bewegung). I took advantage of their sophistic arguments related to censorship and freedom of speech, to claim my right to attend these meetings.
To put things further into perspective, I am not just a Muslim woman, I wear a hijab too, leaving no ambiguity towards my identity, which I did not wish to conceal on this particular endeavor.
The first meeting I attended took place in a pub in Vienna´s second district. As I was walking down to the pub, I saw a tall man dressed in black military-style clothes standing in front of the entrance. Although unable to assert his position, his image triggers every conventional notion of the far-right in my mind. In a panicked move, I skip past the door, just about to abort the mission, when I take an unintended glimpse from the windows to a distressingly familiar view.
