30/08/2021
There are around one hundred thousand Jewish people in Hungary, but a new study has found that the same government and state controlled discourse which has led to persecution of the LGBTQIA Communities and gypsies, has boosted anti-semitic conspiracy theories and dangerous neo-fascistic ideas about Jewish people controlling the world. The study produced on behalf of the Mazsihisz — the country’s oldest and largest religious Jewish federation —found that hate speech and other forms of antisemitism in public life have been on the rise.
The latter trend has been driven by a combination of the coronavirus pandemic, the Hungarian government’s campaign against the philanthropist George Soros and the politicisation of the Holocaust and Hungary’s experience of Nazism and communism, according to a report in the well established British paper the Jewish Chronicle. The report found that although some of the anti-semitism came from predictable groups on the hard right, such as the Our Homeland Party, a neo-fascist split from the governing Jobbik Party, it was also true that the government and its appendages in television and press had been nurturing anti-semitic tropes by slandering prominent Jews such as George Soros. Liberal and Centrist MEPs are calling on more EU sanctions against the increasingly authoritarian regime in Budapest.
