Hungarian Jews are increasingly disturbed by the failure to ban two openly fascist newspapers, by Holocaust revisionism in a mainstream daily and the anti-Semitic overtones in recent remarks by a leading member of Parliament.
Zsolt Zetenyi, who represents the governing Hungarian Democratic Forum and chairs the Parliament’s Human Rights Committee, complained that victims of Nazism still receive justice because there is no statute of limitations on war crimes but victims of more recent Communist brutality do not because the statute exists.
Zetenyi was interviewed on Hungarian radio shortly after he met with a representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
He questioned whether international law, which is often the basis for bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, takes precedence over national law.
His implication was that international law favors Jews while other Hungarian citizens are not so protected.
“It is not fair that the killer of a Jew shot into the River Danube during the Holocaust can be punished even nowadays, while the killer of a person in 1956 (during the anti-Communist uprising) in Budapest cannot be punished” under Hungarian law, Zetenyi said.
He also seemed to imply that Jews were somehow implicated in Communist crimes because many Jews became Communists after the war in reaction to Nazism.
WIESENTHAL CENTER DELEGATION DUE SOON
Zetenyi mentioned that a delegation from the Wiesenthal Center would visit Budapest soon to investigate justice for Jews in Hungary.
Another parliamentary leader of the governing party, Imre Konya, has defended the publication and sale even in the halls of Parliament of the fascist newspaper Hunnia, which is sold on the streets with a neo-Nazi newspaper, Saint Crown.
Although of limited circulation, both publications are anti-Semitic. Yet no legal action has been taken to ban them.
Meanwhile, the pro-government newspaper Uj Magyarorszag (New Hungary) revised sharply downward the number of Jews who perished in the Holocaust and claimed most were victims of Soviet Communists, not Nazis.
In an article published March 3, the newspaper said 300,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II.
Altogether, 1.2 million Jews were killed, “not only by the German Nazis but mainly by the Soviets during the war,” the newspaper said.
The article referred to a book called “The Great Tragedy,” published in Australia by an unknown writer, Viktor Padyanyi, as the source of its claim that the figure of 6 million Jewish dead was an exaggeration.
On Feb. 3, the daily Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation) claimed that forced-labor service in military units during World War II was devised to give Jews a better chance to survive.
The spate of anti-Semitic articles in Budapest was protested by the leadership of the Viennese and Austrian Jewish communities before the Hungarian Jewish leadership condemned them.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
