The time is out of joint! A conference has been held in the CEU building on Nádor utca, a major street in the heart of Budapest. For years I have been hearing from liberal politicians and their supporters in the media that the Hungarian government has closed down the Central European University and driven it out of Budapest.
According to news reports, on 16 and 17 September an international conference open to the press was held at the university’s Budapest campus, attended by prominent representatives from liberal academia and political life. How could such a thing happen? Clearly it is because those who have been campaigning on the premise that the university has been shuttered have not been telling the truth.
We Hungarians are not surprised: we know how George Soros and his team work. The Hungarian speculator has always been adept at making actions against his business enterprises look like appalling social injustices – or even wicked anti-Semitic attacks against him personally. But what could have been in the minds of the illustrious academics, politicians and intellectuals who attended and spoke at this conference? How did they reconcile their appearance at the university with the lie that the CEU had been run out of Budapest by the Hungarian government? I wonder how these academics, professionals and politicians feel now, having lost all professional credibility after swallowing the lie propagated by George Soros and his global network? This is embarrassing – very embarrassing. Perhaps someone should organize a conference on that subject at the CEU campus in Budapest.
Hungary is being attacked over the Soros University for refusing to allow the billionaire speculator to continue his abuse of power. In the 1990s, Soros’s loyal ally Bálint Magyar – education minister in a governing coalition of liberals and ex-communists – introduced a rule that gave the Soros University an unfair competitive advantage over Hungarian universities. We closed this loophole by requiring that all foreign universities with a presence in Hungary operate under the same conditions and comply with Hungary’s higher education legislation. With one exception, all such universities fulfilled those regulatory conditions without any problems. That single exception was the Soros University. For its founder there was greater benefit to be gained by crying wolf and organizing an international campaign against Hungary than by simply giving up the privileges he had acquired.
Lies beget lies.
Here is the shortlist for the biggest liar and lie.
– Guy Verhofstadt (then leader of the Liberal parliamentary group in the European Parliament) wrote that “Europe is disgraced”.
– In a short film produced by her Dutch green party on “The Sargentini Report” on Hungary, the MEP Judith Sargentini said that “the Central European University is forced out of the country”.
– The European Commission’s Country Report on Hungary for the 2020 European Semester referred to “the end of the Central European University’s academic activities in Hungary”.
The true disgrace for the whole European Union is that these demonstrably false allegations are being used as the basis for EU legal proceedings.
Quo vadis Europa?
Viktor Orbán