The European Parliament Working Group on Antisemitism (WGAS) has sharply criticised the erection in the centre of Budapest of a statue in memory of Gy\u00f6rgy Don\u00e1th, a wartime-era Hungarian politician notorious for his antisemitic and racist views.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonouring an avowed Nazi apologist, racist and antisemitic in the heart of one of our European capitals is a deep insult to the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews who perished in the Shoah,\u201d WGAS chairman MEP Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe call upon the Budapest municipality and the Hungarian government to prevent this outrageous whitewashing of history and apology for the worst crimes perpetrated on this continent,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Between 1939 and 1944, Gy\u00f6rgy Don\u00e1th served as a member of parliament for the\u00a0governing\u00a0Hungarian Life Party (Magyar \u00c9let P\u00e1rt). \u00a0In addition to being the president of its Budapest chapter, he\u00a0was deputy chairman\u00a0of the party from 1943.<\/p>\n
Don\u00e1th was an enthusiastic supporter of Hungary\u2019s anti-Jewish laws. He founded an umbrella organisation for smaller racist organizations called \u201cInter-organisational Cooperation\u201d (Egyes\u00fcletk\u00f6zi Egy\u00fcttm\u0171k\u00f6d\u00e9s) whose\u00a0by-laws referred to \u201cthe social war against alien races\u201d and called for the exclusion of \u201cthose races and nationalities from Hungarian life which we consider to be detrimental to Hungary and the ethnicities living here, primarily the Jews\u201d.<\/p>\n
The organisation was also a supporter of the National Socialist ideologies. He is regarded as one of the principal ideologues of Hungarian racism and was instrumental in fomenting hatred of Jews,\u00a0Swabians (ethnic Germans living in Hungary) and Romanians.<\/p>\n
Don\u00e1th was executed after the war on charges of conspiracy against the (by then Soviet-controlled) republic for allegedly trying to rebuild the Hungarian Community\u00a0(Magyar K\u00f6z\u00f6ss\u00e9g), a\u00a0racist organisation\u00a0previously belonging to the\u00a0umbrella organization he\u00a0founded.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are particularly shocked by the apparent government approval for the erection of this statue, which is displayed by the scheduled presence of Fidesz deputy chairman\u00a0Gergely Guly\u00e1s and former Prime Minister Peter Boros\u00a0to officiate at its unveiling,\u201d MEP Aguilar said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPandering to the basest nationalist and xenophobic elements in Hungarian society should be beneath the dignity of official and semi-official government representatives. Moreover, to do this just across from Budapest\u2019s Holocaust Memorial Centre shows disdain for the memory of those killed in the Shoah and represents Holocaust revisionism at its worst.\u201d<\/p>\n
The European Parliament Working Group on Antisemitism brings together Members of the European Parliament at a cross-party level to improve the way in which the EU combats Antisemitism.<\/p>\n
Co-signed by:<\/p>\n
Juan Fernando L\u00f3pez Aguilar, WGAS Chair<\/p>\n
Heinz K. Becker, WGAS Vice-Chair<\/p>\n
Cecilia Wikstr\u00f6m, WGAS Vice-Chair<\/p>\n
Peter Niederm\u00fcller, WGAS Member<\/p>\n
Patricija \u0160ulin, WGAS Member<\/p>\n
Soraya Post, ARDI* Co-President<\/p>\n
(*ARDI – European Parliament Anti-Racism and Diversity Intergroup)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The European Parliament Working Group on Antisemitism (WGAS) has sharply criticised the erection in the centre of Budapest of a statue in memory of Gy\u00f6rgy Don\u00e1th, a wartime-era Hungarian politician notorious for his antisemitic and racist views. \u201cHonouring an avowed Nazi apologist, racist and antisemitic in the heart of one of our European capitals is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":770,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-wgas.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}