Harry's Place

By Karl Pfeifer
Is the World Jewish Congress as wussy (“gittegylet”) as the liberal Budapest weekly Magyar Narancs claims? An association of wusses could never gather 500 delegates in Budapest.
Is the WJC the entity which controls the governments of Israel or the USA as Hungarian conspiracy theorists claim? You need to have lost any sense [...]

By Karl Pfeifer
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán is doing everything in his power to obtain legitimacy for his antidemocratic politics from the upcoming World Jewish Congress meeting in Budapest (May 5th-7th 2013). Gullible foreigners are fed all kinds of half- or untruths about the curbing of Nazi activities by the government [1]. I was there [...]

By Karl Pfeifer
The World Jewish Congress will hold its 14th Plenary Assembly in Budapest on 5-7 May 2013. Five hundred delegates and observers from the WJC’s affiliated Jewish communities and organizations in 100 countries are expected to convene in the Hungarian capital. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has confirmed that he will address the opening [...]

The Hungarian government has banned the “Give gas” motorcycle rally organized by rightwing extremists which had been scheduled for April 21, the same day as the March of the Living commemoration of the Hungarian Holocaust.

Guest post by Karl Pfeifer
On the national holiday March 15, the Hungarian government awarded the annual Tancsics prize – the country’s highest journalistic award – to Ferenc Szaniszlo, a presenter for the pro-government Echo TV channel. Szaniszlo is notorious for spreading Jewish conspiracy theories and describing the country’s Roma minority as “human monkeys”.
Zoltan Balog, the [...]

Back in 2006 Republican Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey earned my admiration with his powerful denunciation of American internet and technology companies for “a ’sickening collaboration’ with the Chinese government and for ‘decapitating the voice of the dissidents’ there.”
So I was especially disappointed to read that Smith has become an apologist for the antisemitism-tolerant [...]

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (US Helsinki Commission) will hold hearings today (3 p.m. EDT) in Washington on “The Trajectory of Democracy – Why Hungary Matters.”
Scheduled to testify are Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University; Sylvana Habdank-Kolaczkowska, Freedom House; and Paul A. Shapiro, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Representatives of the Government of Hungary and [...]

Despite the efforts of Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his rightwing Fidesz party to publicly distance themselves from the antisemitism and anti-Romanyism of the Hungarian far right, they just can’t seem to avoid stepping in it time after time.
The Independent reports:
Hungary’s right-wing government faced fierce criticism today for awarding its top state journalism prize to [...]

Karl Pfeifer reports that these stickers appeared this month on the doors of professors at the Eötvös Loránd University, the largest and best university in Hungary:

The wording in English:
Jews! The university belongs to us, not to you!
Regards: the Hungarian students…
In 2011 Karl interviewed one of the professors, the Hungarian-Jewish philosopher Agnes Heller, about the growing [...]

Cross-posted from Eva S. Balogh at Hungarian Spectrum
I’m afraid I have to write again about the infamous Zsolt Bayer, a scribbler of extremist views. There are tabloid journalists like Bayer everywhere, but Zsolt Bayer is not a run-of-the-mill hack. He holds the #5 membership card of Fidesz. (László Kövér, president of the Hungarian parliament, holds [...]