Liberal “Roma prejudice” criticised
April 4th, 2015A conservative author likens a liberal webmagazine to the far right Kuruc.info, as representatives of two opposing but equally prejudiced and one-sided world-views about conflicts between the Roma and the police.
In Magyar Nemzet, Zoltán Veczán calls 444 “the liberal Kuruc.info”, after the left-liberal webmagazine suggested that a policemen was motivated by his own racism in shooting a Roma fugitive dead in Örkény, 50 kilometres outside Budapest, on March 17th. The conservative commentator blames 444 for uncritically giving credit to the version of the relatives of the victim, who denied that the man had attacked four police officers with an axe before he was shot. They quote the accounts of relatives of the victim as facts, while they report the police version as “allegations”. Moreover, they print accusations that the policeman who fired the fatal shot had racist inclinations, without checking this claim against other sources. His problem is that 444 produces a ready verdict before the case could be investigated, and that such procedures are typical in left-liberal circles who tend to presume that the non-Gypsy majority is basically racist. “They are not alone in this kind of extremist reporting”, Veczán continues, for the extreme right-wing racist Kuruc.info portal calls the victim a ‘Gypsy criminal’ who attacked the policemen trying to arrest him with an axe. The two prejudices are like the North Pole and the Antarctic, Veczán concludes: “they are far apart, but their climate is similar”.