When U.S. President Donald Trump hosts Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Monday in Washington, he should realize that he is welcoming a leader who deals in hateful anti-Semitic tropes.
Orbán will tell him otherwise. The Hungarian leader will insist that he’s the best friend of Hungarian Jews. He’s anything but.
Not long ago, at an event dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism in the European Parliament, Hungarian State Secretary Takács Szabolcs defended his boss by telling me how Orbán’s Fidesz party is funding an institute to research anti-Semitism and combat anti-Israel sentiments among radical leftist and Islamic circles.
He argued vociferously — and truthfully from what I have heard — that Orbán is not personally hostile to Jews and pointed to Budapest’s close relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
What about the attacks against billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros, I asked. In the 2017 parliamentary election, Orbán promoted anti-Semitic imagery of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to control the world. Thousands of posters of a grinning Soros with the slogan “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!” were posted around the country on billboards, on the metro, and on the floors of Budapest’s trams. Just this year, a new media campaign featured Soros and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker with the caption: “You also have the right to know what Brussels is preparing for!”
The Hungarian government’s anti-migrant rhetoric endangers all minorities, including Jews, and its comparisons with the 1930s are unmistakable.
Szabolcs hesitated and struggled a minute for an effective response. He ended up answering that the ads were needed to prevent Soros from flooding Europe with Muslim migrants. That does not make things better.
The Hungarian government’s anti-migrant rhetoric endangers all minorities, including Jews, and its comparisons with the 1930s are unmistakable. Not by chance, the Hungarian leader is rewriting his country’s history of that period. In the Holocaust Remembrance Project that I recently edited, we showed how the country’s right-wing government has rehabilitated wartime figures as anti-communist icons.
It has inflated Hungary’s role in “saving” the Jews of Budapest and minimized discourse on their own complicity in deporting and killing Jews. State-appointed “historians” have relativized the horrors of the Holocaust, and often depict their own people as victims of what they say was Jewish-supported communism.
After Orbán came to power in 2010, he appointed András Levente Gál to direct the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center in Budapest. According to Paul Shapiro of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Gal’s first proposal was to eliminate mention of [wartime Hungarian leader] Miklós Horthy’s alliance with Adolf Hitler and participation in the dismemberment of three neighboring states — Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia — as ‘irrelevant’ to the Holocaust.”
George Soros is frequently treated as a scapegoat by Viktor Orbán | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Gal’s second proposal, Shapiro recounted, “was to sanitize the record of Hungarian participation in the ghettoization and deportation of the country’s Jews and place full blame for the destruction of Hungarian Jewry on Germany.” Even though the resulting international outcry led to Gál’s dismissal, Orbán’s government went ahead anyhow and built a “Memorial to the Victims of German Occupation” with the same message.
Orbán has persisted in rewriting history. He has praised Horthy for reconquering lost territories. Several towns have erected statues or placed plaques on buildings in the wartime leader’s honor. Busts of Horthy still stand across the country, despite his record of virulent anti-Semitism. According to Shapiro, Horthy wrote “with pride to his Prime Minister in 1940, ‘I have been an anti-Semite my whole life.’”
In Budapest, the Orbán-sponsored House of Terror recounts the “terror” of totalitarian regimes, communist and Nazi alike. But it has only one room on the Holocaust and around 20 on the communist period, diminishing the unique tragedy of the Holocaust and relativizing its horrors with those of the communist era. The competition of victimhood is the guiding philosophy behind the house.
The exhibition also carries the undertone that communists were Jews. State-appointed director of the Terror museum, Mária Schmidt, has published a paper trying to “prove” that the post-war communist regime in Hungary was more oppressive than the pro-Nazi wartime government. In response, renowned Holocaust scholar Randolph L. Braham dubbed Schmidt “a formerly budding Holocaust scholar turned into an ardently nationalist Holocaust distorter.”
Hungary has a large Jewish population of around 100,000 and is home to some of the most beautiful Jewish sites in Europe, including the Continent’s largest synagogue. Yet since 2014, with the exception of the relatively small but compliant Orthodox Chabad movement, the country’s Jewish community has had strained relations with the national authorities.
The government has stripped two progressive Jewish congregations (Bét Orim and Sim Shalom) of their official status. Despite the successful appeals to and favorable decisions of the Constitutional Court of Hungary and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, Orbán has restricted their rights to access tax rebates and financial assistance.
As the Hungarian leader steps up his embrace of anti-Semitic imagery, the country’s Jews are becoming more and more uncomfortable. András Heisler, leader of the Jewish community in Hungary, personally appealed to Orbán to end the Soros poster campaign.
Netanyahu overlooks his friend Orbán’s peccadillos because of the Hungarian leader’s strong support for his hard-line policy toward the Palestinians.
Orbán rejected the appeal and suggested that Hungarian Jews do more to oppose Muslim immigration to Europe. Israel’s ambassador to Hungary initially denounced the anti-Soros campaign, saying it “sows hatred and fear,” but then Israel’s foreign ministry issued its own statement critical of Soros.
Unfortunately, Netanyahu overlooks his friend Orbán’s peccadillos because of the Hungarian leader’s strong support for his hard-line policy toward the Palestinians.
It’s not just Trump who is embracing the Hungarian strongman. Here in Europe, the center-right European People’s Party recently suspended Orbán’s Fidesz party over the Juncker and Soros posters. But it refrained from expelling him because it wants Orbán’s support in order to remain the largest party in the European Parliament.
It is no longer acceptable to look the other way. The Hungarian leader not only attacks academic freedom, criminalizes humanitarian aid for refugees and migrants, and undermines the independence of the judiciary. He peddles in unpunished anti-Semitism.
William Echikson is editor of the Holocaust Remembrance Project.