The Hungarian government has hit back at Angela Merkel’s Minister of State for Europe alleging that anti-Semitism is “rampant” in their country, saying that it is in fact multicultural Germany where Jews are threatened by racially and religiously aggravated attacks.
Michael Roth, a member of the left-wing Social Democratic Party which joined Angela Merkel’s supposedly centre-right Christian Democrats in a left-right establishment “grand coalition” after the last country’s last federal election, levelled the allegations in an interview with the t-online.de website.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s foreign secretary, Péter Szijjártó, has responded robustly, summoning the German ambassador and issuing a public statement ridiculing Roth as someone who “took every opportunity he got to attack Hungary and Poland” whos “tend[s] to go ignored these days”.
He added, however, that Roth’s anti-Semitism allegation could not go unanswered, urging him to “stop making demeaning attacks on Hungary” and recommended that the minister of state “take a look around his own backyard”.
“Our Jewish compatriots have no reason to be afraid,” the Hungarian insisted.
“Their cultural festivals don’t require the presence of soldiers armed to the teeth, their synagogues and cemeteries were rebuilt with state funding, and we were the proud hosts of the European Maccabi Games last year,” he continued — with those first comments likely being a reference to the rising prejudice and, increasingly, attacks against German Jews and Jewish institutions in Germany as mass immigrations grows the number of people in the country with a cultural enmity towards the Jewish community.
Allegations of anti-Semitism against the Hungarian government usually centre around its criticism of the pro-open borders plutocrat George Soros, who is an avowed atheist but of Jewish ethnicity.
Viktor Orbán and his government have always denied that his criticisms of Soros are connected to his ethnic background, however, insisting that it is the billionaire’s anti-borders political activism which they are concerned with — activism which, in Orbán’s view, has been the true cause of the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Europe, as many of the people who have been helped to migrate hold “political and religious views [which have] markedly increased the sense of insecurity in Jewish communities”.
The national conservative administration found an influential ally on this score in 2017 in the form of the Israeli government, which issued a statement in 2017 declaring that accusations of anti-Semitism should not be used “to delegitimize criticism of George Soros, who continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected governments by funding organizations that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Hungary was “at the forefront of the states that are opposed to… anti-Jewish policy” the same year, and praised Orbán as a “true friend of Israel” the year after.
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