Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban long proclaimed zero tolerance of anti-Semitism but has more recently risked angering Israel and Jewish people with remarks apparently courting radical right-wing voters ahead of 2018 elections. Orban’s language, embracing notions of “ethnic homogeneity,” appears fashioned to occupy territory on the far right abandoned by the radical nationalist opposition party…
Budapest authorities moved on Wednesday to shutter the Aurora Cafe, which has served as a gathering spot for Hungarian opposition activists and nongovernmental human rights advocates. Authorities cited illegal drugs, but management said the government’s real aim is to muzzle opposition voices. In America, “the Resistance,” as some call the activist opposition to President Trump,…
For over a year now, Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, has been waging an increasingly shrill campaign against billionaire George Soros, using classical anti-Semitic imagery to signal to his listeners that the Hungarian-born American businessman is a shadowy foreign Jew exercising sinister influence over their country. It is an invocation that is deeply ironic on at…
(JTA) — A leading official in the European Commission — one of the European Union’s governing bodies — implied that efforts by Hungary’s prime minister to shut down a university founded by George Soros are anti-Semitic. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has long harbored animosity toward Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish financier who has donated millions of…
Budapest’s Central European University (CEU) is the latest casualty in Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s war on liberalism and free expression. Earlier today the Hungarian Parliament approved an amendment to a higher education law that would, per the New York Times, “restrict the independence of universities that offer diplomas from countries where they do not…
Gábor Vona, who heads Hungary’s far-right party, Jobbik, famously showed up on his first day as a member of Parliament in 2010 wearing the uniform of a banned racist and an anti-Semitic paramilitary group. But the morning of Wednesday, February 1, sitting in his office overlooking the partially frozen Danube River, Vona was dressed in…
As the first results of the U.S. presidential election were released on November 8, the Union of French Jewish Students, which goes by the acronym UEJF, posted a worried note on its website. “Donald Trump, through his racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, conspiracy-theorist, xenophobic, misogynist, anti-abortion, pro-death penalty and torture positions, is a threat to human rights,…
In America, the Facebook post announcing a Jewish social event focused on human rights might seem innocuous, if a bit cute: “No One Is Illegal: Concert, New Klezmer Disco, Syrian Dance Lesson,” the invitation to a fundraiser for refugees read. But it’s a significantly more risky proposition in a country led by a right-wing prime…
100% of profits support our journalism
