Roth’s opinion article was essentially a copy-paste adaptation of every other editorial you’ve read about Hungary over the last few weeks, regurgitating claims that the government’s extraordinary measures to fight COVID-19 amount to “dictatorship.”
So I pushed back, listing key points that these critics never mention and the outrageous claims they make and never have to back up with hard facts because they have a compliant media that will publish them. The EUObserver published my response as a letter to the editor – I didn’t get the space on the editorial page that they gave to Roth. You can read the censored version of my response here.
I wrote in my response that it’s odd to see such hysterical criticism of Hungary at a time when Europe faces the biggest public health crisis that it has seen in a hundred years. Behind that criticism are political interests, a cabal of politically motivated groups who exploit Hungary as a whipping boy to drive their agenda. Any challenge to their poorly informed arguments, however rational or fact-based the challenge may be, is dismissed or ignored.
Their arguments are an Orwellian Newspeak, and when we push back it’s a thoughtcrime, a contradiction of their orthodoxy.
Proving my point, the editors at the EUObserver censored the following lines from my text:
What we have here is a cabal of politically motivated groups – more than a few of them, like Human Rights Watch, funded by the “philanthropist” George Soros – creating a political problem. They oppose the Orbán Government because we are proponents of national sovereignty, Judeo-Christian culture and identity and a strong EU based on strong nation states, and an obstacle to their globalist agenda.
I asked the editors for an explanation. No response yet. I’ll update this post if and when they do.
UPDATE: On April 27th, nearly three days later, the editor responded with this:
"As you were warned in advance, and as we did the previous time, we will not publish your anti-semitism - overt or dog-whistle.”
Apparently, the @euobs won’t allow you to call George Soros a “philanthropist” and point out the plain fact that many of Hungary’s critics are from Soros-funded organizations.