Left accused of teaming up with Nazis

The leading pro-government daily devotes two comments in as many issues to accuse the left of condoning pro-Nazi behaviour in its bid for power two weeks before the general election.

In Magyar Nemzet, Dávid Megyeri quotes an article from the New York weekly Jewish Voice which quotes György Szilágyi, a prominent Jobbik politician as defending the white supremacist Aryan Army organisation at an unspecified date. The pro-government columnist also mentions a recently published photo showing another Jobbik MP, Dániel Z. Kárpát as making what appears to be a Nazi salute at some time in the past. The pro-government columnist adds that (10 years ago) a third Jobbik politician, Márton Gyöngyösi urged Parliament to make a list of MPs of Jewish descent (as he later explained, he meant those holding Israeli citizenship). The left, Megyeri writes, while often branding its adversaries as Nazis, apparently doesn’t shrink from forming an alliance with pro-Nazi politicians in order to win a majority of seats in Parliament.

In addition to mentioning such examples in Jobbik’s past, writing in the same daily, Zsolt Bayer excoriates opposition-leaning historian Krisztián Ungváry who, in his reading, condones the anti-Semitic atrocities perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists during World War II. (In an article on Telex, the historian admitted that World War II Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera was an anti-Semite, adding that in eastern Ukraine, Jews who had suffered anti-Semitism in pre-war Poland initially tended to welcome the Soviet occupation in September 1939 and were thus targeted by Ukrainian nationalists as being pro-Soviet.) ‘Just imagine what would happen if I tried to develop such arguments about Hungarian World War II Nazis or in connection with the Councils’ Republic of 1919’, Bayer fumes.

Tags: anti-Semitism, campaign, Jobbik