Migrant clash – Hungary as a new Israel?
September 19th, 2015An independent conservative analyst believes the migrants who clashed with Hungary’s security forces used tactics known from Gaza, where Palestinians deliberately put children at risk in their media war against Israel.
On Mandiner, deputy editor Gellért Rajcsányi analyses a series of media images where migrants appear as if they were victims of mistreatment by Hungarian police. A woman grabbing a wire fence on a New York Times photo, for instance, was not under arrest, as the viewer might think, but refused to leave a railway station platform. A woman with her child falling on the rails with a police officer standing in front of them was in reality pushed there by a migrant desperately trying to avoid being registered in Hungary. Rajcsányi’s latest example is the scene of children weeping from tear gas in front of the closed border crossing where Hungarian police used tear gas and water cannons to stop a group of migrants who had broken through the border fence after having battered the police with a barrage of stones. Putting toddlers in the first line of a wild battle is strongly reminiscent of Pallywood (Palestine Hollywood), and the media strategies used by Hamas in Gaza to win the sympathy of western TV audiences, Rajcsányi suggests. Hungarians who have so far experienced this kind of thing in reports from the Middle East, have now had a direct taste of it, he concludes.