Showing posts with label Viktor Orbán. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Viktor Orbán. Show all posts

Friday, 14 September 2018

Theresa May and the Tories are the ones with the serious anti-Semitism problem


One of the first world leaders Theresa May met after she was appointed Prime Minister was the fanatically right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Since then the Tory party have continued to cosy up to Orbán and his anti-Semitic, xenophobic, judiciary-rigging, free speech-attacking regime.

After Orbán retained power in the 2018 Hungarian elections which featured a massive anti-Semitic poster campaign the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson Tweeted gushing praise for Orbán and his party.

And in September 2018 Tory MEPs in the European Parliament sided with all the exreme-right nasties in Europe (Front National, Golden Dawn, PiS, PVV, AfD, Swedish Democrats, True Finns, FPÖ, Lega Nord, and Britain's own UKIP) in order to defend Orbán's government against a motion of censure that was overwhelmingly supported by the European centre (from conservatives, through liberals to the socialists and greens).

The Tories were the only (supposedly) mainstream government in Europe to ally themselves with Orbán and the extreme-right.


Here's one of Orbán's most notorious quotes about Jews: "We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world".

Isn't it extraordinary that the mainstream media spent the entire summer digging around in Jeremy Corbyn's past to cherry-pick absurd out-of-context quotes, fixate over images of him laying a wreath (at a graveyard where none of the Munich terrorists were even buried), and even 
smear a Jewish Holocaust survivor as an anti-Semite to paint Corbyn as an anti-Semite ... but when yet more evidence of the Tories' active collusion with a horrifically right-wing government led by an unmistakably anti-Semetic tyrant comes to light, suddenly the mainstream media anti-Semitism guns have fallen silent?

Orbán's extremism isn't just limited to anti-Semitism either. He's continually attacked Muslims as "invaders", he's been rigging the Hungarian judiciary by stacking it with pro-government figures, he's clamped down on free speech and attacked the free press. His supporters have even drawn up a blacklist of charity workers, campaigners, journalists, academics and other public figures considered "enemies of the state".

It's quite incredible that Theresa May and the Tories have openly colluded with this vile regime right in front of our eyes, for years, safe in the knowledge that they won't be held to account for it by Britain's docile, compliant, and ridiculously right-leaning press.

Even now, when the Tories' scandalous support for this vile regime is incontestably recorded in the voting record of the European Parliament, there's nowhere near as much condemnation and noise from the people who were howling at Corbyn, and making hyperbolic accusations that Labour are an "existential threat" to Jewish people just a few weeks previously.

Instead of vehemently condemning this outrageous Tory collusion with one of the most notorious anti-Semites in Europe, the Jewish Board of Deputies expressed only "disappointment"!

Others to have whipped up the anti-Semitism furore to attack Jeremy Corbyn and undermine the momentum towards genuine democratic socialism haven't even said a word.


The day after this Tory collusion with Orbán, Jonathan Sachs stood up in the House of Lords to talk about anti-Semitism and didn't even mention it!


BBC heavyweight Andrew Neil, who has repeatedly pushed the anti-Semitism attacks against Corbyn remained silent, which is hardly surprising given his personal involvement with the Hungarian government.

All of this raises the question of how stupid and gullible they think we are. 

They seem to imagine that they can manipulate us into believing that the lifelong anti-racist campaigner Jeremy Corbyn is the Jew-hater, whilst they actively turn a blind eye to Theresa May and her party repeatedly sucking up to the most notorious anti-Semite in Europe!

In reality this is such a spectacular display of over-reach that swathes of the mainstream media are permanently wrecking their own reputations. 


Repeatedly trying convince people that black is white is bad enough, but then after posing as valiant anti-Semitism campaigners for the entire summer of 2018, their deafening silence on the Tory collusion with Orbán clearly exposes their political partisanship and their utter hypocrisy.

If you decide to present yourself as a valiant anti-Semitism campaigner all summer, then you'd better not turn a blind eye to it in the autumn when your political allies are up to their necks in it, otherwise you've just burned your journalistic reputation to the ground.

Anti-Semitism is a vile form of racist bigotry that needs to be confronted wherever it's found.


It's not a convenient issue to be weaponised and used as political ammunition, only to be immediately forgotten about when your political allies decide to defy the European political consensus and actively support the most notorious anti-Semite in Europe.

This political weaponisation of anti-Semitism is particularly disgusting because it cheapens the fight against anti-Semitism by making the issue seem like partisan political point scoring, rather than a serious problem that need to be confronted wherever it arises.


 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.




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Wednesday, 12 September 2018

Tory MEPs just aligned themselves with the European extreme-right to defend the Hungarian anti-Semite Viktor Orbán



Theresa May and the Tories continually use the anti-Semitism furore to distract attention away from their lamentable track record in government, but when it comes to the crunch their actions speak louder than words.

When it comes to proof of higher rates of anti-Semitism in the Tory ranks, Theresa May does nothing to weed out anti-Semitism in her own party's ranks.

When it comes to other forms of bigotry it's even worse, with the Tory party outright stonewalling calls for an inquiry into anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory party from the Muslim Council of Britain and two Muslim Tory politicians.

But the actions of the Tory group of MEPs in the European Parliament absolutely take the biscuit, with 17 of the 19 voting against a motion of censure against Viktor Orbán's blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim government in Hungary.

The right-wing Hungarian government has been interfering in the independence of the Hungarian judiciary in order to stack it with pro-government judges, attacking press freedoms, and using anti-Semitic smear campaigns.

The European Parliament motion of censure against the Hungarian government for their attacks on the independence of the judiciary and press freedom was passed by 448 votes to 197 after the vast majority of liberal, socialist, green, and centre-right conservative MEPs supported it, but it's deeply concerning that the Tory party aligned themselves with the rag-tag bunch of extreme-right parties that opposed it.

The parties the Tories decided to side with include Orbán's own Fidesz party, UKIP, the French neo-fascists Front National, the extreme-right Italian Northern League, the Nazi-founded Swedish Democrats, and the extreme-right Polish government who are enacting similar judiciary-rigging and free speech repressing policies themselves.

Theresa May then attempted to wash her hands of this scandalous vote with claims that she was unaware of the vote, as if incompetence is somehow an excuse for her allowing members of her party to side with a judiciary-rigging, rights-quashing bunch of extreme-right anti-Semites!

So when it comes to Tories weaponising anti-Semitism in order to score points against Labour, just remember that when it comes to actions, the Tories align themselves against the political majority in Europe to stand shoulder to shoulder with the extreme-right to defend the anti-Semitic extremist Viktor Orbán!


 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.




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