In a past image now published by a Jewish newspaper, György Szilágyi, Jobbik’s vice-president, can be seen waving with his arm in a Sieg Heil salute in a football stadium; he also defended the American neo-Nazi group Aryan Army in a video interview, TEV reports.
Another revealing video of a right-wing politician has been released. This time, the American paper The Jewish Voice published a photo of György Szilágyi, Member of Parliament and Vice-President of Jobbik, raising his arm in a Nazi salute in a football stadium.
The paper also found a Duna TV video of Szilágyi explaining the incident:
the Aryan Army, whose banner was displayed in the stadium, is in fact „not a Nazi symbol” but „a group of whites in prison,”
just as there is one for blacks, and it is in fact just an „advocacy group.”
In fact, Szilágyi claims on the recording that one of the organization’s mottos, „white power,” is actually part of the emblems of 80 percent of American basketball teams, just as he claims „black power” is on those of black basketball teams. (Both claims are false)
Szilágyi is the leading politician of the opposition coalition Jobbik, ranking 69th on the recently compiled national list. The equally antisemitic Z. Dániel Kárpát, who also recently posted a photo of himself doing a Nazi salute, is in 9th place on the national list.
The Jewish Voice recalls that György Szilágyi had stated something similar previously:
„We are living in a world where the head of state of Israel, Shimon Peres, can declare that they will occupy Hungary.”
It was Szilágyi who in 2013 proposed the banning of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which he called an „anti-Hungarian organization.” The center had condemned a group of Hungarian soccer ultras
who had displayed a banner celebrating László Csatáry at a match. Csatáry, as a police officer, played a major role in the Kassa deportations in 1944.
Last year, György Szilágyi posted on Facebook about Covid, saying that Viktor Orbán could divide society for political reasons „no matter what the cost. (…) Right now, he is dividing people into those with and without immunity certificates.” He then made the following analogy:
„What’s the next step? Those who don’t have an immunity card will be put in a concentration camp?”
“This man claims to defend the Hungarian nation and Hungarian values, but he is doing neither, instead resorting to antisemitism and racism, placing blame for imagined injuries on the backs of Jews and Roma. A familiar tactic,” the American Jewish paper notes.
“Contrary to Russia’s ludicrous claims,” the paper continues, “that Ukraine should be ‘de-Nazified’ maybe the focus should actually be on true and bona fide Neo-Nazis who are seeking power in democratic countries.
Such men should not be allowed to gain power, even by democratic means, for history tells us that, once in power, these same men [do] not respect democratic means for long.”
As TEV Secretary Kálmán Szalai has repeatedly pointed out, there is only one way for Jobbik to be credible in Hungarian public life:
“If it disbands its organization, which was conceived in racism and antisemitism, and apologizes to the Hungarian community in a manifest manner for its years of hate politics run amok.”
