BUDAPEST (EJP) --- A Hungarian
Minister confronted the country’s recent anti-Semitism row head on when
he told parliament he was Jewish. After the far-right Jobbik party was
roundly criticised by both the government and Jewish community alike for
calling for a registry of Hungary’s prominent Jews to be drawn up in
the interests of “national security”, the State Secretary of the
Development Ministry Janos Fonagy revealed to cross-party politicians:
“My mother and father were Jewish, and so am I, whether you like it or
not”.
In
a direct challenge to Jobbik’s 47 parliamentary representatives in the
386-seat chamber, he added: "I cannot choose, I was born into this. But
you can choose, and you have chosen this path," as he cautioned they
would have to “bear history’s judgement”.
Last
month, Jobbik’s foreign policy cabinet head Marton Gyongyosi said that
the recent Gaza escalation “makes it timely to tally up people of Jewish
ancestry who live here, especially i the Hungarian government, who,
indeed, pose a national security risk to Hungary”.
In an apparent response to his concerns, Fonagy specified he did not have dual citizenship with Israel and was not religious.
Jobbik’s
stranglehold on the youth vote, amongst which it commands the highest
proportion of support of any political party with 20% approval ratings,
and its overall position as the country’s third largest political party
is largely attributed to the European nation’s ailing economy and
increasing social tensions caused y virulent austerity measures
implemented to overcome the entrenched recession.
It
is far from the first time Jobbik has found itself embroiled in an
anti-Semitism scandal, after MP Gyongyosi came under fire earlier this
year for appearing to question the number of Hungarian Jews murdered and
deported during the Holocaust, as he claimed it had become a political
business to elevate the numbers.
He said
that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is a "Nazi system" and
compared Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to Joseph Goebbels.
"The Jews don’t have the right to talk about what happened in the Second World War," he said, adding that "Jews are looking to build outside of Israel. There is a kind of expansionism in their behaviour”.
Whilst
the Hungarian chief rabbi Slomo Koves concede that not “all people who
vote for Jobbik are anti-Semites”, he also warned that “if Jobbik brings it (anti-Semitic
rhetoric)into the public discourse, even people who were not
anti-Semites before, they feel like it's a way to show your
frustration... The problem is that this has an effect on the state of
mind of all Hungarians”.
An
estimated 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and
about 100,000 of the country's current 10 million-strong population are Jewish.
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