Partners in hate crime: Orban and Johnson
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
A statement by the Jewish Socialists Group in advance of the Victor Orban/Boris Johson meeting today, which JVL endorses.
It shows the clear affinities between Orban and Johnson, with the Tories working happily in Europe in a bloc with the Hungarian party Fidesz, a racist and conspiracist enthno-nationalist formation.
This article was originally published by Jewish Socialist on Thu 27 May 2021. Read the original here.
Partners in hate crime: Orban and Johnson
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What does the BoD have to say about Boris Johnson fraternising with “Jew hating” Orban? Didn’t the Brexiteers talk about a Muslim invasion during the referendum campaign? Hasn’t this government prorogued parliament and challenged the powers of our judiciary? Can we take Johnson seriously when he tries to disown the authoritarian policies of Orban? Does anybody believe that the party he represents isn’t a home for islamaphobes?
This is a very good statement. It could have added that Orban has described Admiral Horthy, the pro-Nazi ruler of Hungary during the war, who presided over the deportation of 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz, as an ‘exceptional statesman’
Yet the silence from the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council, Holocaust Educational Trust, CST, CAA and all the other Zionist organisations is deafening. Johnson welcomes a genuine anti-Semite to Downing Street and they have nothing to say.
Neither, for that matter, does Sir Keith Starmer.
Anyone who seriously believes that the ‘antisemitism’ campaign in the Labour Party was about anti-Semitism needs their head examining.
No surprise here. Fascism described as a temporary alliance of the elite and the mob . Johnson and his ministers are a perfect example of the elite.
Fidesz had a poster which said: ‘Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!’ At first glance it looks rather baffling: what exactly does it mean? I am certain it refers to a speech by Hitler in January 1939, when he said that when he prophesied that one day he’d be leading Germany, ‘the Jews’ (he always used the tell-tale conspiratorial definite article) were ‘laughing’, and he then prophesied that any European war would lead to ‘the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’.
In November 1942, Hitler made a speech referring back to his earlier one, adding about people who laughed at his predictions: ‘Of those who laughed then, countless numbers no longer laugh today; and those who still laugh now will perhaps no longer laugh a short time from now.’ This speech was delivered at a time when Jews were being murdered by the thousand by firing squads and in gas chambers.
I’m sure that whoever wrote the Fidesz slogan must have known about these speeches. The slogan makes no sense unless Hitler’s speeches are brought into the equation.
I see that Corbyn condemned Orbán a couple of days ago:
“Today Boris Johnson will receive Hungary’s former president Viktor Orbán. Johnson must challenge Orbán on his government’s Holocaust revisionism, antisemitism & Islamophobia, and physical abuse of detained refugees.”
See Stephen Pollard – editor of the Jewish Chronicle no less – making a strong intellectual argument on the issue at https://twitter.com/stephenpollard/status/1398246737236668422