Hungary continues to target Soros unapologetically
“Yes, maybe he is a Jew, but we are criticizing what he is doing and what he represents.”
By TAMARA ZIEVEUpdated: NOVEMBER 30, 2017 10:00HUNGARIAN GOVERNMENT SPOKESMAN Zoltan Kovacs at his office in Budapest on Wednesday(photo credit: Courtesy)
Four months after a Hungarian government campaign against Hungarian-American Jewish billionaire George Soros made waves across the world, Government Spokesperson Zoltan Kovacs defended the ongoing campaign and insisted that it’s not antisemitic.The first wave of the government’s poster campaign against Soros’s stance on immigration depicted Soros laughing, alongside the words “Let’s not leave Soros the last laugh,” and reportedly spurred several incidents of antisemitic graffiti on the posters throughout the country.The posters made international headlines just before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the country in July, and though Netanyahu defended the Hungarian government’s condemnation of Soros, media reports indicated that they were taken down just ahead of his visit.The campaign was by no means over, however, and Kovacs told The Jerusalem Post during a meeting with a small group of reporters at his office on Wednesday, that it was just one of seven posters responding to a seven-point plan by Soros on immigration.“Mr. Soros has announced, in his own words, in his own language, on questions of illegal immigration, how it should be handled in Europe and how the monetary and fiscal background should be established,” Kovacs said.Soros himself finally spoke out about the campaign last week, after the Hungarian government mailed a national consultation to eligible Hungarian voters, soliciting their opinions about the “Soros Plan.”In a statement published on his personal website, Soros accused the consultation of containing “distortions and outright lies that deliberately mislead Hungarians about George Soros’s views on migrants and refugees.”Kovacs noted that the consultation received an exceptionally high response in comparison with other national consultations.“What Mr. Soros has suggested is coming back via the [EU] Commission and we are going against that vision [as well],” said Kovacs. “Yes, maybe he is a Jew, but we are criticizing what he is doing and what he represents,” he added.Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party has a strong anti-immigration stance and Kovacs asserted that Europe has not been facing a “refugee crisis” in the past couple of years but a “migration crisis.”
