Hungary official called out for comparing Soros to Hitler

A government-appointed cultural commissioner in Hungary is being condemned for comparing liberal billionaire George Soros to Hitler in an article about Hungary and Poland’s row with the EU over rule of law.

“Europe has become the gas chamber of George Soros… George Soros is the liberal Fuhrer,” Szilard Demeter wrote on the pro-government news-site Origo.hu on Saturday.

Poles and Hungarians “are the new Jews,” said Demeter in the article that addressed the ongoing deadlock between the EU, and Hungary and Poland over their veto of the bloc’s funding due to its rule of law criteria.

“These ‘Liberaryans’ are now aiming at excluding us Poles and Hungarians from the one last political community where we still have rights,” he said.

Jewish and Holocaust memorial groups at home and abroad condemn the tirade from Demeter, a 44-year-old writer appointed in 2018 as head of a prestigious literary museum and in 2019 as a cultural commissioner.

“We utterly reject the use and abuse of the memory of the Holocaust for any purpose,” the Israeli Embassy in Hungary says in a statement.

“There is no place for connecting the worst crime in human history, or its perpetrators, to any contemporary debate, no matter how essential,” it adds.

— AFP