The billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros gets attacked by authoritarian leaders such as Prime Minister Victor Orbàn of Hungary.

……..2017 parliamentary election, Orbán promoted anti-Semitic imagery of powerful Jewish financiers scheming to control the world. Thousands of posters of a grinning Soros with the slogan “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!” were posted around the country on billboards, on the metro, and on the floors of Budapest’s trams. Just this year, a new media campaign featured Soros and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker with the caption: “You also have the right to know what Brussels is preparing for!

………..After Orbán came to power in 2010, he appointed András Levente Gál to direct the Holocaust Memorial and Documentation Center in Budapest. According to Paul Shapiro of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Gal’s first proposal was to eliminate mention of [wartime Hungarian leader] Miklós Horthy’s alliance with Adolf Hitler and participation in the dismemberment of three neighboring states — Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia — as ‘irrelevant’ to the Holocaust.”

…………Orbán has persisted in rewriting history. He has praised Horthy for reconquering lost territories. Several towns have erected statues or placed plaques on buildings in the wartime leader’s honor. Busts of Horthy still stand across the country, despite his record of virulent anti-Semitism. According to Shapiro, Horthy wrote “with pride to his Prime Minister in 1940, ‘I have been an anti-Semite my whole life.’

………….

Hungary has a large Jewish population of around 100,000 and is home to some of the most beautiful Jewish sites in Europe, including the Continent’s largest synagogue. Yet since 2014, with the exception of the relatively small but compliant Orthodox Chabad movement, the country’s Jewish community has had strained relations with the national authorities.

The government has stripped two progressive Jewish congregations (Bét Orim and Sim Shalom) of their official status. Despite the successful appeals to and favorable decisions of the Constitutional Court of Hungary and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, Orbán has restricted their rights to access tax rebates and financial assistance.

………..

Orbán rejected the appeal and suggested that Hungarian Jews do more to oppose Muslim immigration to Europe. Israel’s ambassador to Hungary initially denounced the anti-Soros campaign, saying it “sows hatred and fear,” but then Israel’s foreign ministry issued its own statement critical of Soros.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu overlooks his friend Orbán’s peccadillos because of the Hungarian leader’s strong support for his hard-line policy toward the Palestinians.

https://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-anti-semitism-problem-hungary-jews/

Through misinformation Orbàn’s population have been encouraged to accept a rewritten history that  Hungary’s role in “saving” the Jews of Budapest was greater than it actually was and minimized their part played  in deporting and killing Jews. The Orbàn government has appointed “historians” who even suggest  Jewish-supported communism led to the suffering of their population.

The truth is hard to obtain under Orbàn’s reshaping of universities, libraries and Internet access.

Hungary, one of the oldest states in Central and Eastern Europe, had its first communist experience in 1919 when attempts to impose a communist regime spread chaos and brought the country to the verge of disaster.

The following two decades of peaceful development ended when the Soviet Union occupied Hungary in World War II and used military threats to set up a communist government. Any resistance to communist authorities was met with violence. In 1945–46, some 35,000 people were arrested on political grounds and 1,000 of them executed or tortured to death. Another 55,000 were detained in concentration camps.

https://communistcrimes.org/en/countries/hungary

Rewriting history and reducing access to truth is an authoritarian mechanism of control. We see it in practice in Israel’s far right government. They aim to project a heroic stance against Muslims who, they say, would spread terror and want to take control of democracies.

Here is an extract from ‘Friends of Israel’, published in April, 2023:

As scholars Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail Bakan point out, apartheid Israel has long enjoyed solidarity from the governments of other settler-colonial states like the US, Canada and Australia, as well as former imperial states like Britain and France. All these countries retain huge power in the world and support Israel’s apartheid system in numerous ways.10 Since 1977, Israeli politics has fairly consistently moved to the right, and its current coalition government is the most far right in history. In the post-9/11 era, the opportunistic positioning of Israel as the ‘front line’ of the ‘War on Terror’ by many Israeli politicians and significant elements of the Zionist movement has accelerated. This plays into a ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative preoccupied with a confrontation between ‘the West’ and ‘radical Islam’ which greatly appeals to the far right.11 Perversely, despite the anti-Semitic affinities of far-right authoritarian leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán……… India’s Narendra Modi…….. US president Donald Trump, these men are among those who came to be counted, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as Israel’s closest allies.12

Simultaneously, the Israeli government and Zionist movement have sought to move away from the broad and long-standing consensus that anti-Semitism is ‘hostility to Jews as Jews’.13 Instead, they have promoted the idea that some types of criticism of Israel or Zionism constitute a ‘new anti-Semitism’. As British sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris notes, the term ‘new anti-Semitism’ is not itself particularly novel, having appeared at least as early as 1967.14 It gained prominence, however, from around the turn of the millennium – a point at which Zionism, as we will see, entered a period of systemic crisis – as part of an ideological offensive apparently stimulated by that crisis. Scholar Brian Klug explains that the ‘new anti-Semitism’ thesis cast leftists (alongside Muslims), rather than the far right, as the main perpetrators of this novel form of racism. Meanwhile, its victim – rather than Jewish people – is the state of Israel, understood as ‘the collective Jew’. Klug notes the lack of clarity pervading the voluminous literature on ‘new anti-Semitism’ but discerns that ‘on one point there is a virtual consensus: anti-Zionism as such is beyond the pale’.15……….

Bakan and Abu-Laban note, the Zionist movement ‘lays claim to anti-racist ideological space as a response to anti-Semitism’ even while it simultaneously advances ‘colonial expansion in the Middle East’.18 The deep tensions here were perhaps most vividly illustrated at the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, when Israel and its allies sought to condemn the conference itself and withdrew, citing anti-Semitism, while other delegates conversely sought to condemn Israel for practising apartheid against Palestinians.19

Despite its deep flaws, the ‘new anti-Semitism’ thesis has been promulgated widely by its advocates and gained considerable institutional acceptance. This process began in 2005, when the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency – then called the European Union Monitoring Centre (EUMC) on Racism and Xenophobia – produced a ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism. Author Kenneth Stern, whose works include a 2004 ‘Proposal for a Redefinition of Antisemitism’ and the book Anti-Zionism: The Sophisticated Anti-Semitism, was a key influence.20

While the EUMC working definition gained limited traction, it soon resurfaced in a strikingly similar document produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental institution established in Berlin in 1998.21 The latter has been endorsed by numerous actors – including, as we will see, the British government.

The authoritarians point the finger at Muslims and have conflated them with Leftists,  of which they stir up a fervent popular anger to both.

This belief system has grown through hate rhetoric spread globally. It defies logic and brings fear and instability, plus distrust within previous well integrated communities. They become more ripe for exploitation.

It is important to disassemble the rhetoric and return to historic evidence, lived by survivors and told to us all.

Extract from the above book:

More important than people’s ignorance, however, was the sense of discomfort that such stories inevitably provoked. According to Frank Keizer, people in Holland reacted to his story of incarceration at Theresienstadt by saying, ‘I don’t want to know. That’s all over now; be glad you survived.’16 Jews who returned to other countries reported similar reactions. In France too, according to Auschwitz survivor Alexandre Kohn, ‘there was a general indifference’, and Jews were urged to draw a line under their experiences.17 In Hungary returning Jews were beaten if they dared to suggest that they had suffered more than their Christian neighbours.18 Even in America, Jewish survivors who immigrated were often treated with impatience: ‘the war was over: “enough already!”’19

One must remember that ordinary Europeans had also suffered terribly during the war, particularly in the final year – but there was at least some comfort in the thought that they had all been through it together. After the liberation the whole continent began constructing myths of unity in adversity. These myths suited pretty much everybody, from former collaborators who wanted a chance to be brought back into the fold, to an exhausted public that was eager to put the war behind them, to the politicians who wanted to rebuild a sense of national pride. Even at an international level, the idea that all the different peoples of Europe had suffered together under Nazism was a convenient way to rebuild a common sense of brotherhood between battered nations. But the presence of the Jews made a mockery of such myths. Not only had they suffered much, much more than everyone else, but none of the other groups had come to their aid: the comfortable thought that Europeans had been ‘all in it together’ was demonstrably untrue.

When Lord Russell of Liverpool, who had been a serving soldier in WWI, and attended the Nuremburg trials after WWII, wrote his bestseller book, detailing the war crimes of the Nazis against the Jews, the then British government chose to ban the book, preferring this subject was not aired:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scourge_of_the_Swastika

The tragedy for the Jews remains and cannot be shrugged off. Israel became a convenient way of moving ‘the Jewish problem’ away from countries who had not gone to their aid and should have prevented the horror which befell them. Now they are, justifiably, fighting with that truth which none can deny and which countries, such as Germany, have sworn to support Israel despite the apartheid of Palestinians.

But the plan to build Israel in the Middle East was symbolic of imposition of a European Jewish State within a region redrawn continually since 1915. The concept of Israel was used for perpetuating colonialism for the countries who supported it, creating a narrative of Jews returning to a homeland after thousands of years, repeating a story and planting the idea of a right to the land and subjugation of the Palestinians under an apartheid system.

26th May 2025: collective punishment of Palestinians through starvation as a weapon of war. They are the victims of history when the colonialist British and French drew borders which suited them, not the inhabitants. Now we have fervent Zionism hitting the innocents again and again.

See https://www.glimpsefromtheglobe.com/regions/redrawing-middle-east/

And from a recent Oxford University debate, see why racist Zionism cannot be supported, but respect for Jews is strong, past and present:

https://substack.com/@abbasabdulmalik/note/c-115783727?r=2941k8