A Hungarian ministerial commissioner has come under fire for an article comparing American-Hungarian billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, a staunch critic of Hungary’s government, to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
“Europe is George Soros’ gas chamber,” Szilard Demeter, ministerial commissioner and head of the Petofi Literary Museum in Budapest, wrote in an opinion article Saturday in the pro-government outlet Origo. “Poison gas flows from the capsule of a multicultural open society, which is deadly to the European way of life.”
The comments drew outrage from Hungary’s Jewish community, including the Unified Hungarian Jewish Congregation, which called the article “tasteless” and “unforgivable.”
“(The article) is a textbook case of the relativization of the Holocaust, and is therefore incompatible with the government’s claim of zero tolerance for anti-Semitism,” the group wrote in a statement.
In the article, Demeter, appointed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to oversee cultural production, compared Soros to Hitler, writing he was “the liberal Führer, and his liber-aryan army deifies him more than did Hitler’s own.”
Soros, who was born in Hungary and is a Holocaust survivor, is a frequent target of Orban’s government for his philanthropic activities that favor liberal causes. Government media campaigns targeting Soros have led to charges of anti-Semitism.
The article addressed a conflict over the European Union’s next budget, which member states Hungary and Poland are blocking over provisions that could block payments to countries that do not uphold democratic standards.
Demeter referred to the two countries, both of which are under EU investigation for undermining judicial independence and media freedom, as “the new Jews.”
The government of Israel, a close ally of Hungary, condemned Demeter’s comments. The Israeli Embassy in Budapest tweeted, “We utterly reject the use and abuse of the memory of the Holocaust for any purpose … There is no place for connecting the worst crime in human history, or its perpetrators, to any contemporary debate.”
Gordon Bajnai, Hungary’s prime minister in 2009-2010, wrote on Facebook on Sunday that if Demeter isn’t removed from his post by Monday, “Hungarians and the rest of the world will obviously consider (his) statement as the position of the Hungarian government.”
(AP)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
8 Responses
Hitler may be to much, but It can not be denied Soros was a Nazi collaborator.
Soros has bragged about how he helped the Nazis.
They are wrong he’s worse than hitler
The Zionists are the ones who most “abuse of the memory of the Holocaust” for their anti-Jewish propaganda purposes.
I wouldn’t say worse than Hitler, just a nasty Kapo
I was going to say that lots of YWN commenters have in the past compared Soros to Nazis, but I guess some of them took care of that for me.
No, Moshe and Ujm, he was NOT a nazi collaborator, and he has not “bragged” about being one. Aren’t there enough true things to accuse him of, that you insist on discrediting your own side by making up blood libels against him?!
On the other hand, he is certainly a destructive force, an enemy of the entire free world, and it’s not unreasonable to compare him to the nazis. I am sick and tired of this irrational insistence, like a religious dogma, that one must never compare anyone or anything to the nazis, that the nazis must be treated as something unique in history, from which we can never learn anything because it is impossible for them to ever happen again.
Especially since NOBODY WHO MAKES THIS CLAIM ACTUALLY BELIEVES IT. Every one of them DOES compare situations they don’t like to the nazi history. Every one of them. How many of them batted an eyelash when Trump or George W Bush were called “literally Hitler”?
HITLER WAS NOT UNIQUE. In his own day, Stalin and Mao were indisputably just as bad, and since then Pol Pot joined that rank. Who can deny this?
Has Soros committed crimes like the nazis? No. But nobody is claiming he’s exactly like the nazis, just that he’s like them in some ways, and that is true.
Milhouse, read his book and watch 60 min interview.`Soros (yamach shmo) was part of a Nazi collaborators who were assigned with the task of confiscation property of the Jews who where shipped to Auschwitz.