A member of Hungary's main opposition party has accused the Jews of trying to take over the country.
"I'm a Hungarian nationalist. I love my homeland, love the Hungarians and give primacy to Hungarian interests over those of global capital - Jewish capital, if you like - which wants to devour the entire world, especially Hungary," Oszkar Molnar, a member of parliament, said in a television interview earlier this month.
As proof of his assertion that Jews are plotting to take over Hungary, Molnar claimed to have discovered that the language of instruction in Jerusalem's schools is Hungarian, and when asked why, students said they were "learning their future homeland's language."
The statement sparked an outcry among Hungarian politicians, with protests coming from ... the ruling Socialist Party, the youth wing of the Alliance of Free Democrats, and a group of intellectuals known as the Democratic Network, as well as the Jewish community.
But Molnar's party, Fidesz, has not condemned his statement - and Fidesz, according to the polls, is likely to take power when elections are held this spring. Party leader Viktor Orban did term the statement "embarrassing," but declined to denounce it. He said he would not even consider ousting Molnar from his party or parliamentary faction, as the remark "did not violate the party's bylaws."
Rumors of a mass Jewish return to Hungary have been floating around the country for some time. But until now, they have been confined to marginal, far-right web sites.
I would love to hear back from those who, in the past, have complained in comments to this blog that Fidesz is not associated with bigotry against Jews and Roma.
A 45 year-old Roma woman was shot dead, her 13 year-old daughter severely wounded by unknown attackers in Kisléta during the night of Sunday/Monday. (Kisléta, with its 1 900-strong population, lies 60 km from Tiszalök and 30 km east from Nyíregyháza). Following the murder, Hungarian National Police High Commissioner József Bencze doubled the reward offered for information about the identity of the criminals involved in attacks against Roma, stated the Hungarian National Police. The 100 million Hungarian Forint reward is the highest in the history of Hungarian criminology (the reward was upped for the last time on April 25th by the High Commissioner, to 50 million Hungarian Forint). The National Investigation Office took over the investigation of the crime committed in Kisléta on Monday at dawn.
The woman was shot by pellet gun in one of the last houses of a street lying at the edge of the village. The bullets hit her on her chest, head and arm. Her daughter was wounded on the neck and arm and was transported to András Jósa Hospital in Nyíregyháza.
The 13 year-old girl’s condition has been stabilized and is satisfactory but serious and life-threatening, said Pál Felföldi, lead traumatologist. (…) Since there are no eyewitnesses in the case, police are watching over the girl outside the intensive care unit where she is currently treated, because she might be in possession of important information about the attackers.
There might have been two of them
The crime scene investigation, the gathering of evidence and the search for and questioning of eventual witnesses went on until early afternoon in Bocskai Street, at the edge of the village, behind which lies a corn field. A dirt road nearby leads towards Nyírbogát, which the attackers probably used for their escape.
According to the Hungarian Press Agency (MTI), shots were fired from two hunting guns on the family, meaning that there were at least two attackers. The police found cartridge cases coming from the pellet guns. They were given to the National Investigation Office experts for examination in Budapest.
According to the Hungarian Press Agency (MTI), the examination ascertained that similar firearms had been used in several attacks against Roma. According to the police, several details of the attack fit with the pattern of the successive attacks on Roma. This is why the investigation was taken over by the National Investigation Office, which opened an inquiry for murder attempted against several persons.
Three-four shots were heard
Mayor Sándor Pénzes told Index that the neighbors had heard three of four shots on Sunday between 11.30 p.m. and 12 p.m. The attacker or attackers kicked the entrance door in and started firing at once. The victims were found by family members. The girl has not yet been questioned as she is still in a state of shock. Her wounds are serious, she is currently in the intensive care unit, there is no precise information as to her condition.
According to Sándor Pénzes, relations between Hungarians and Roma in the village are very good. „The victim was a hard-working woman. She was raising her daughter alone, amidst clean and healthy conditions.” – said the mayor. Mária B. was a widow and had two daughters. The family works regularly and gets social welfare as well. „The whole village is astonished about this execution. We don’t know what could have motivated the murderers.” – said the mayor to the Hungarian Press Agency.
A Romani woman was shot dead in the village of Kisléta in Eastern Hungary, early Monday morning (August 3, 2009). The 45-year-old woman's 13-year-old daughter was also seriously injured in the attack.
Initial police reports suggest that the incident is related to a series of attacks targeting Romani communities in Hungary. Amnesty International has voiced concern about the growing number of attacks against the Romani community in Hungary and the failure of the police to investigate effectively.
The organization said that it welcomed the decision that the killing and its apparent racial motive will be investigated by the Hungarian National Bureau of Investigation. The agency was established specifically to investigate serious crimes.
Between January 2008 and June 2009, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) documented 39 attacks against Roma and their property. Eight people have died in these attacks.
27-year-old Róbert Csorba and his five-year-old son were killed whilst fleeing their house which was set on fire in a suspected arson attack in Tatárszentgyörgy in February. Jenõ Kóka, a 54-year-old Romani man, was shot dead as he left his home to make his way to the nightshift in the local chemical factory where he worked in Tiszalök on 22 April.
Last November, a man and woman were shot after their house was petrol bombed in Nagycsécs, a village in north eastern Hungary. The increasing number of attacks against Romani individuals and their homes has created a climate of fear and intimidation.
"The Hungarian Government has firmly condemned the attacks against members of the Romani community," said Nicola Duckworth, Director of the Europe and Central Asia Programme of Amnesty International. "This is a welcome move, but what is most urgently required is an effective police investigation.”
In the Tatárszentgyörgy case, the head of the local criminal department violated the rules of the investigation,according to a report issued by ERRC, the Legal Defence Bureau for National and Ethnic Minorities (NEKI) and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (TASZ). (That report is available here in pdf.)
Amnesty International has voiced concern that there might be more cases of attacks that remain unreported and is urging the Hungarian authorities to take positive action to address underlying prejudices against the Romani community.
In its 2009 Report on Hungary, the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance noted that the "victims of such acts may often be reluctant to report the racist elements of violent offences against the person, whether owing to a sense of shame, due to fear of retribution, or because they feel it is unlikely that serious follow-up will be given to this aspect of a crime."
The report cited above had some very interesting information about February's murders in Tatárszentgyörgy. The medics who responded to the emergency call in that case found a wounded five-year-old child, but left the scene for 20 minutes before returning to treat him. He died. Local police who responded told the surviving family members that there had been no shooting; that the victims had been injured in an explosion accidentally started by a fire. When the family members later called the police back to the scene to point out shell cartridges on the ground near the house, the police accused them of planting the cartridges. The police continued to refuse to investigate the murders even after family members pointed out that buckshot had been found in the victims' clothing. It actually took the intervention of Viktória Mohácsi, a Member of the European Parliament, to get the police to secure the area and begin an investigation. If not for her intervention, the police would have continued to cover up the crime. Even after her intervention, police failed to interview numerous witnesses and made no attempt to trace a suspicious Mercedes Benz which had been parked outside the house before the attack.
With respect to Monday's murderous attack, according to new reports, forensics have determined that the gun used has been used in two previous attacks against Roma. (Read here.)
FBI agents are assisting with the investigation of the crime. (Read here.) The virulently anti-Roma militia Magyar Garda (associated with the fascist Jobbik party) are threatening to send a motorcycle gang to patrol the village, whose residents are all Roma. (Read here.) The proposal for biker gang patrols arose after the right-wing television channel Hir-TV and right-wing newspaper Magyar Hirlap reported the murders as being motivated by something other than racism, seemingly to shift blame to the Roma themselves. (A poorly translated incidence of this is available here. Magyar Hirlap baselessly claims in that piece that only a dark-skinned person could have passed unnoticed through the village to commit the crime. More accurate accounts are available here and here and here.)
Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai has called on the leadership of the national police to act to prevent further attacks on Roma. (Read here.) Details about what actions police will take to protect Roma are scanty. According to some reports (read here) a special police network will act as a task force to react to anti-Roma violence, presumably to prevent a replay of the sort of police cooperation with racist murderers evidenced in Tatárszentgyörgy.
Meanwhile, gangs of skinheads associated with the fascist Jobbik party have been coducting rallies featuring heavy metal concerts in and around Budapest. These gangs, clad in shirts bearing the slogan"White Hungary", have beaten up a number of Roma, including a pregnant woman and a young boy, and chanting that they will "kill every Roma in Hungary". (Read here.)
Meanwhile, over the border in Slovakia, the fascist party called Slovenská pospolitosť (Slovak Brotherhood) is following the example of Jobbik and attempting to mobilize anti-Roma violence there as well. (Read here for an example of this.) Local human rights groups are calling for authorities to to ban the Slovenská pospolitosť to prevent anti-Roma violence from taking root . (Read here and here and here.) Prime Minister Robert Fico responded yesterday that he will have the Interior Ministry move to have the group banned. (Read here.)
Csanád Szegedi (pictured at right), one of three newly elected Hungarian members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the fascist Jobbik party, came to the parliament's July 14 opening session wearing the uniform of the party's illegal Magyar Garda militia. (Read here, and here, in an article auto-translated from Slovak. Background here in an article in French.) This uniform is based on that of Hungary's Arrow Cross, a pro-Nazi party which committed mass murders of Jews during the Holocaust. (Read here.) A ruling declaring the Magyar Garda illegal was affirmed by a Hungarian appeals court on July 3. The original ban followed a rising tide of anti-Roma violence, in which the paramilitary conducted several pogroms culminating in the murder of a Roma man and his young son.
Szegedi's two fellow Jobbik MEPs, Krisztina Morvai and Zoltán Balczó (pictured below on an earlier occasion), came to the EP opening session attired in 19th Century Hungarian military uniforms. Jobbik advocates returning Hungary to what they regard as its "golden age" by expanding its borders to include Slovakia, Transylvania, Ruthenia, and other areas it lost after World War I. That sort of populist nationalism tends to appeal to the far-right. It bypasses the brain and goes straight to the gut. It even reaches across the Atlantic and appeals to American neo-Nazis at Stormfront (here) and the Ron Paul crowd (here).
After the Hungarian fascists had their costume party, a MEP representing Hungary's ruling Socialist Party moved that the EP ban the wearing of paramilitary uniforms in parliament sessions. (Read here.)
Meanwhile the two British National Party (BNP) representatives, Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, were assigned seats in the back of the room. Another British non-aligned party MEP refused to be seated next to them. (Read here.)
When Krisztina Morvai gave her first speech to the parliament, she first identified herself as a "human rights attorney" (her usual shtik), then argued against a proposal that the EP study what action to take with respect to Iran. She claimed that Hungary's human rights record was worse than that of Iran, and that any look at the crimes of the Iranian dictatorship must be preceded by a study of Hungary's treatment of its far-right.
Nick Griffin later rose to support Morvai's argument, parroting her speech and taking it a bit further. Griffin claimed that the west focused on Iranian human rights violations and not on Hungary's purported suppression of its fascists because of a shadowy international conspiracy. He went on to claim that, if the EP studied the Iran question, British soldiers would soon be returning from a war with Iran with horrific injuries. (He also indicated that British soldiers live on the banks of picturesque rivers.) Based on his concern for British young people, Griffin demanded an inquiry into Hungary's suppression of its fascist militias.
Watch them here:
With respect to the Magyar Garda uniform's similarity to that of the Arrow Cross, as a point of reference, pictured below are Arrow Cross militiamen circa 1944-1945 wearing their winter uniforms. You may be interested to know the current views of an Arrow Cross leader who escaped justice in Australia. Read about that here.
Arrow Cross militia receiving machine guns from German Consular employee, 10 Pasar�ti avenue, Budpest (Source: Hungarian National Museum)
Embedded below is a TV news report on the fascist British National Party (BNP) making common cause with the Hungarian fascist party Jobbik. (Hat tip: Edmund Standing at Harry's Place.) Both parties gained seats in the European Parliament in the June 4, 2009 election, to the shame of both countries.
(By way of background to that video and to the following report, you can read my earlier post concerning the Magyar Gárda, Jobbik's paramilitary wing, here. Harry's Place followed up with this post on Jobbik focusing on MEP Krizstina Morvai, who was featured in the video above. As the video mentioned, Morvai recently got in a bit of hot water for referring to Jews with obscenities in a public internet forum. Read here. In response, a former foreign minister wrote that Morvai's gross language was a step down from previous Hungarian fascist politicians, writing that "this tone and style astonish, unworthy of Hungarian traditions and a woman. All decent Hungarian people can only condemn this contribution. Such words were not written even by Csurka".)
The racist far-right has been taking advantage of the world financial crisis and the disarray of the liberal left and mainstream conservatives to make inroads among voters disenchanted with mainstream parties. They have been able to bring their extremist message into the mainstream. As reported in the video above, even to a greater degree than was the case with the BNP, Jobbik took a huge leap forward with their success in the European Parliamentary elections. They also scored a political victory when a Hungarian police union representing 10% of the nation's police announced that they were officially affiliated with Jobbik and published the following in their newsletter (read here and here and here):
"Given our current situation, anti-Semitism is not just our right, but it is the duty of every Hungarian homeland lover, and we must prepare for armed battle against the Jews."
...and...
"A crumbling country, torn apart by Hungarian-Gypsy civil war, could easily be claimed by the rich Jews . . . That is why we should expect a Hungarian-Gypsy civil war, fomented by Jews as they rub their hands together with pleasure."
The editor of that newsletter, and the person behind the union, is police Lt. Colonel Judit Szima (pictured below). In addition to running the racist police union, she ran for the European Parliament on the Jobbik list.
Not all the news has been good for Jobbik. Recently, a Hungarian appeals court ruled their militia, the Magyar Gárda, to be illegal. (Read here.) This ruling affirmed a lower court ruling which came after the Magyar Gárda conducted a series of violent anti-Roma rallies (including one outside an integrated public high school in Budapest and several in the integrated town of Tatarszetgyorgy) which culminated in the murder of a Roma man and his young son by fascist thugs. That was soon followed by the sudden enlistment of 400 new recruits. (Read here.) Subsequent to an appeals court affirming a lower court's ban on the Magyar Gárda, Gabor Szabo, one of Jobbik's leaders (pictured below, on the right), announced that the party would not comply with the court order and would, in fact, retain their militia. (Read here.) Jobbik organized a protest (described below) which took place 8 days ago. Another one occured yesterday.
The website Politics.hu (read here) has the following report on last week's Jobbik demonstration in central Budapest's Erszebet Square, which is adjacent to the historic Jewish ghetto (read here). Among those wearing Magyar Gárda uniforms at the demonstration were Hungary's former defense minister Lajos Fur, Jobbik chairman Gabor Vona and Jobbik MEPs (members of the European Parliament) Krisztina Morvai and Csanad Szegedi. The demonstration including other fascist groups such as the 64 Counties Youth Movement, which advocates Hungary's expanding to what it claims are its historic borders. Demonstrators were also demanding the release of Gyorgy Budahazy, who is affiliated with the 64 Counties Group. He is being tried on terrorism charges in connection with several bombings. (Read here and here.) The police broke up the demonstration when it turned violent, with demonstrators throwing rocks and bottles at police and calling them "dirty Jews". Gabor Vona was arrested (pictured in two photos below).
(Many more photos of the demonstration are available here.)
From Politics.hu:
"Police clashed in downtown Erzsébet tér on Saturday afternoon with a few hundred demonstrators who gathered to protest at Thursday’s court ruling dissolving the Magyar Gárda paramilitary group.
One of the 216 detained was Gábor Vona, head of the Gárda and its affiliated radical right-wing party Jobbik. He was released early Sunday morning. Most of those detained were released Saturday evening.
Police had banned the demonstration, as well as similar planned protests in other parts of Budapest.
Police used teargas to disperse the gathering after some protesters threw beer bottles and other missiles at them, as several Magyar Gárda members and supporters attacked the police. Most of the demonstrators were taken away individually, rather then driven off en masse.
Police later launched criminal proceedings against four people and charged others with hooliganism and disobedience, said spokeswoman Éva Tafferner. One of those arrested had attacked police so crudely that the prosecutor’s office kept him in detention. Another of the detainees was on a police top ten wanted list.
Some 17 people were injured, while a HírTV staff member was hit on the head by a bottle and a correspondent of the Index website was kicked, Népszabadság reports. Calm returned to the square by 8 p.m.
After his release, Vona told reporters “we shall defend the national camp from being smashed and Hungarians who swore to be Gárda members from the terror of those in power. We shall not allow a Socialist Party hurtling towards collapse and the Free Democrats an annihilated horde who betrayed the nation to intimidate the Gárda which has broken no law. We expect Viktor Orbán and Fidesz to make a statement on the current situation.”
During the night MEP Krisztina Morvai and extreme right Calvinist pastor Lóránt Hegedûs Jr. visited Vona and Gárda members at the jail on Buda’s Gyorskocsi utca."
According to news reports, Lorant Hegedus, a Calvinist pastor, not only visited the jailed Jobbik yobs, he also donned the paramilitary uniform of their Magyar Garda for this demonstation. (Read more about him below.)
It seems that Viktor Orban and his right-wing Fidesz party, apparently the big winners in Hungary's European Parliament elections having won 14 of the nation's 22 seats, are actually being hoisted on their own petard. According to reports, over one million of their voters didn't vote on election day, whereas Jobbik voters came out in force. Fidesz for years has capitalized on the same anti-Roma bigotry as overtly fascist parties do, and has offered support to the fascist party MIÉP. That may have seemed like a good move as MIÉP disappeared from the Hungarian Parliament and Fidesz gained seats. Now that Jobbik is presenting them with competition, and pushing them to support more overt violence, racism and challenges to the rule of law, that strategy isn't looking quite so clever. (Read the Economist's take on this here, and the Hungarian Spectrum's take here and here.)
Yesterday, the Magyar Garda defied the courts to hold two more rallies in Budapest, one week after the first one. (Read here. See photo below.) According to the Budapest Times report:
"(Gábor) Vona told the crowd that Jobbik was 'preparing to govern' and its deputies, if in the next parliament, would be wearing Guard (i.e. Magyar Gárda) uniforms at its first session. He added that his party would continue its fight against the ban on the Guard. It is not the Guard, but 'Gypsy criminals, drug users, multi-national companies, Israeli acquisitions in the country and the government itself that the people find terrifying'."
For those who want to watch some very boring Jobbik propaganda, embedded below is a video they posted on YouTube featuring a brief but tedious interview with Gábor Vona, along with dull rock music and the usual Attention Deficit Disorder camera work and editing. As is typical of neo-fascists, Vona portrays his party as the last, best hope to preserve Hungarian national identity in particular, and Christianity in general, from the barbarian horde (i.e. Jews and Roma).
I briefly mentioned Lóránt Hegedüs Jr. above. Read more about himhere and here and here. You can read about how he hosted David Irving's several visits to Hungary here. That post points to a connection between Fidesz and the group which hosted Irving's 2008 lecture at a Hungarian church in New York City.
Hegedüsis both a minister of the Hungarian National Synod of the Calvinist Church (or Hungarian Reformed Church), and a senior deputy of the far-right MIÉP party. In August 2001, while a member of Parliament, he published an infamous article (read pdf here at page 25) in which he wrote:
"The Christian Hungarian state would have warded off the [ill effects] of the Compromise of 1867 had not an army of Galician vagabonds arrived who had been gnawing away at the country which, despite everything, again and again, had always been able to resurrect from its ruins the bones of its heroes. If their Zion of the Old Testament was lost due to their sins and rebellions against God, let the most promising height of the New Testament's way of life, the Hungarian Zion, be lost as well.... Since it is impossible to smoke out every Palestinian from the banks of the Jordan using Fascist methods that often imitate the Nazis themselves, they are returning to the banks of the Danube, now in the shape of internationalists, now in jingoistic form, now as cosmopolitans, in order to give the Hungarians another kick just because they feel like doing so...
"So hear, Hungarians, the message of the 1,000th year of the Christian Hungarian state, based on 1,000 ancient rights and legal continuity, the only one leading you to life: EXCLUDE THEM! BECAUSE IF YOU DON'T, THEY WILL DO IT TO YOU."
That call for expelling Hungary's Jews was condemned by many Hungarians, but not all did so right away. Karl Pfeiffer argues persuasively (here) that, the Hungarian Reformed Church, which had chosen to ignore Hegedus fascist and racist activism for years, was finally forced by the attention of foreign media to take some action. In response, they issued an order for their clergy to stay out of partisan politics. In connection with the article, Hegedus was indicted by federal prosecutors for incitement. He accepted a plea bargain in which he agreed to resign from his seat in Parliament and received an 18 month suspended sentence., however, this verdict was annulled in 2003. His article ended up eliciting wide support both from his own party and from many others on the right, such as the supposedly mainstream right-wing party Fidesz. In fact, Fidesz subsequently emerged as a not very secret "secret ally" of MIÉP, and even pushed to have MIÉP removed from the European Parliament's list of banned parties. (Read here.) Lorant Hegedus' article went on to be broadcast repeatedly by a radio station called Pannon Radio and supported in every detail on state-run Kossuth Radio's weekly Sunday talk show "Vasarnapi Ujsag" (Sunday News), which is associated with Fidesz.
Riding on this celebrity, and on the assistance of Fidesz, Hegedüs(unsuccessfully) headed the MIÉP list in the 2004 European Parliament elections.
This Hungarian Spectrum piece is full of valuable information on the connections between the supposedly mainstream Fidesz and the overtly fascist MIÉP, Jobbik and Magyar Garda.
As an aside, the Hungarian Spectrum post about David Irving's New York lecture elicited a number of commenters who found the website via Irving's blog. Irving actually posts a comprehensive list of links to webpages which mention him, which is both kind of sad and kind of amusing. His loyal followers follow these links and leave the sort of comments you'd imagine that they'd leave.
The Hungarian Spectrum recieved a number of comments endorsing David Irving's Holocaust denial (from people such as internet hate literature monger and David Irving's NYC advance man Michael Santomauro,and Danish hate blogger Balder). Interestingly, the blog also recieved a comment supporting David Irving's claim that the post-war Hungarian Communist regime was led by Jews, and that 1956 Hungarian uprising was a fight of Christians against Jewish oppressors. They chose the wrong place to try that one.
The commenter wrote:
It should also be noted that David Irving also wrote an excellent book on the 1956 Hungarian uprising, called 'Uprising - One Nation's Nightmare: Hungary 1956' which was described by Ferenc Kunszabo, editor, Hunnia magazine. Budapest, as 'the best work on the 1956 uprising in the English language'.
The Hungarian Spectrum's Eva S. Belogh, had this to say:
The only problem with this book review (is) that it appeared in a far-right magazine and that the book in question is useless. I who took part in that revolution can attest from personal experience that it was not a revolution against the Jews as Irving claims. It tells a lot about Kunszabo that he finds this the best book on the revolution. Trash it is.
Check out the comments here. Eva later posted this article to further debunk the specious claims by Irving and his fascist friends concerning Jewish culpability for communist crimes.
Remember that one way MIEP gained support was by attempting to rehabilitate the collaborationist wartime Prime Minister, László Bárdossy(read here). The fight against fascists who would distort history in the interest of a current agenda of hate continues.
