Hasan Abadi is a 26 year old artist from Nablus, Palestine, who like millions around the world has been horrified by the ill treatment of Syrian refugees in Hungary, both by government authorities, as well as by the nationalist right in general. The story of a female Hungarian television reporter, Petra László, kicking, tripping and otherwise physically assaulting Syrian children […]
Hungary’s Fidesz government has managed to almost completely desensitize its right-wing supporters and much of Hungarian society to the plight of hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees from Syria, thanks to the overtly xenophobic billboard campaign that it ran for weeks before the acute phase of the refugee crisis. This week, a female camerawoman for the N1 TV online news […]
Hungary’s ambassador to Canada, Bálint Ódor, sent letters to the editor to various Canadian news outlets, in which he attempted to whitewash the shockingly vicious actions of his xenophobic government against Syrian refugees and blamed the media and other EU member states for the crisis. Here is a response from Professor Stevan Harnad: The Ódor excuses are rank and all-too-familiar […]
Magdolna is a hair stylist in Budapest and that is the only thing I know about her. On a hot day she went down to the Keleti Railway Station in Budapest where thousands of refugees were stranded. She set up a chair and started to give free haircuts for kids. She had a sign: Free Haircuts. And that is the […]
It is by now patently obvious that the refugee “crisis” that Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has artificially and systematically created had 3 goals: (1) to divert attention from Orbán’s many mounting corruption scandals, (2) to re-assert and reinforce Orbán’s populistic self-image as the nation’s protector against the invasion of the Turks and the exploitation by the EU and (3) […]
On Thursday, a homeless man in Budapest’s economically disadvantaged 8th District became agitated as he waited outside a small soup kitchen in Bérkocsis Street. The man may have been intoxicated, as he waited for his meal in Budapest’s relentless heatwave, with temperatures soaring to above 36 Celsius. According to eyewitnesses, the middle aged man became impatient and broke the glass […]
Officials from Hungary’s Orbán government, including Minister of Human Resources Zoltán Balog, met with Jewish community leaders this week to discuss new efforts to improve Holocaust education in Hungarian schools and to alert Hungarian Jews to the fact that they too may be “impacted” by the continued wave of refugees, arriving primarily from war-torn Syria and Afghanistan. Based on the […]
In the doldrums of summer, there is a growing and increasingly public conflict between Hungary’s Orbán government and the Ponta administration in Romania. In just the past two days, the diplomatic representatives of the two countries, serving in Budapest and Bucharest, have been summoned by the respective foreign ministries of the two EU member states and both are claiming that […]
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has a new admirer just north of the border in Slovakia. The regional governor of Banska Bystrica (Besztercebánya in Hungarian) Marian Kotleba, sent an open letter to Mr. Orbán on July 28th expressing his support for Orbán’s “brave and effective steps aimed at saving European countries from an inundation of immigrants.” “I express full support […]
I increasingly believe that it is in Hungary’s enlightened self-interest to begin accepting many more of the Syrian and Afghan refugees, rather than stoking fear within Hungarian society and creating a siege mentality, which seems to be the tactic du jour. There is the humanitarian argument, where one might reasonably expect a greater degree of compassion and understanding from Hungarian […]
