SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTRE - EUROPE

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"Your Policy choice lies between Jobbik, Magyar Garda and the leaders of the World Federation of Hungarians on the one hand or to redeem your commitments to the Jewish people, to the European Union and to history on the other".

In a letter to Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, protested "the identity theft of the Holocaust by Janos Drabik, President of the National Strategy Conference of the World Federation of Hungarians."

Samuels argued, "The use of the term is itself an identity theft of another people’s narrative, i.e. the Holocaust of the Jewish people by the Nazi Germans and their helpers," adding, "Drabik appears to conflate the industrial murder of six million Jews with the Trianon treaty or, what he calls, 'The international crime perpetrated by the world leaders at Versailles against the Hungarian nation…'“

The letter continued, "We understand that the post-World War I Allied measures against Hungary at Trianon may be compared with a similar resentment among Germans following Versailles, which led to a revanchist nationalism that morphed into Nazism. Unfortunately, in both cases, nationalism also became a euphemism for anti-Semitism. Thus Drabick’s statement: “We can only consider Jews an integral part of the Hungarian nation […] if they accept a shared fate with the Hungarian nation […] If you do not think Trianon is painful, then you cannot be considered – emotionally and intellectually – a full-fledged Hungarian.”

Samuels emphasized, "The theft of the Jewish Holocaust, the euphemistic exclusion of Jews from the Hungarian community and the construction of the Eagle-Angel monument to 'Hungarian World War II victims’ – thereby deleting from the record Hungarian auxiliaries of the Nazis – seems timed to marginalize the plans to mark the 70th anniversary of the deportation and murder of over half a million Hungarian Jews."

The Centre advised the Prime Minister, "Your policy choice clearly lies between historical revisionism and anti-Semitism of Jobbik, Magyar Garda and the leaders of the World Federation of Hungarians on the one hand or to redeem your commitments to the Jewish people, to the European Union and to history on the other".

"If you choose the later, you must speak out, condemn, and dissociate yourself politically from each and every protagonist of hate-speech against each and every Hungarian victim, be they Jew, Roma or other," concluded Samuels.

For further information please contact Dr. Shimon Samuels on 00(33)609770158, join the Center on Facebook, www.facebook.com/simonwiesenthalcenter, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent direct to your Twitter page or mobile device.