This morning, a friend from Budapest sent me a digital copy of a print newspaper entitled Lokál, distributed free of charge at metro stations, train stations, public places in Hungary and also delivered to private homes. Lokál was established in 2015 by Árpád Habony, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s strategic adviser, and the print daily has a national circulation of 1.16 million […]
This week, the Bratislava-based Visegrad Revue published an essay entitled “Why an anti-Islam campaign has taken root in Hungary, a country with few Muslims,” co-authored by Zoltan Pall, a research fellow in the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore, and Omar Sayfo, contributor to the pro-Orbán Demokrata weekly magazine, who defended his PhD at the University of […]
The premise of fledgling director Viktor Szűcs’s film sounds like the beginning of a classic joke, but this 33 minute production is actually a fantastic short documentary on how Hungarians of different faiths share a meal with other. It is also a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the popular Hungarian reality television show called Fish on the cake (Hal a tortán). For […]
Traditionally, Hungary’s extreme right was not openly Islamophobic. In fact, the Hungarian right-wing in general tended to differ markedly from conservative politicians in North America and much of western Europe in its support for Palestinian nationhood and its criticism of Israel. At the time of the war with Hezbollah back in 2006, I wrote a response to a piece published […]
For the past several weeks, the story of a somewhat mysterious video produced by a Turkish foundation called Türkiye Diyanet surfaced on and off in the Hungarian press, suggesting that there were plans to erect a mega mosque, with four minarets, a restaurant and a hotel in the Kőbánya suburb of Budapest. Based on the released drawings and the video, the […]
