On Saturday, Government Spokesperson Zoltán Kovács rejected claims by German paper Handelsblatt that the Hungarian Government’s attacks against George Soros are anti-Semitic; according the Spokesperson’s letter to the paper, which it did not publish, the trouble with Soros and his network is that their pro-immigration activities disregard the will of the people and are aimed against democratically elected governments.
Since Handelsblatt was not prepared to publish the letter, citing “freedom of the press”, Mr. Kovács published the letter that he had written in reaction to the paper’s editorial published on 16 November under the title “In defence of Soros” on the English language website of the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minister’s International Communications Office.
In the letter, the Spokesperson pointed out that in the article, editor-in-chief Andreas Kluth claims that “the conspiracy theories about George Soros are being spread by Hungary”, and traces this back to “the most despicable forms of European anti-Semitism”.
Mr. Kovács stressed that Viktor Orbán and his government never refer to the Jewish roots of George Soros, who himself speaks little of this and instead emphasises his American identity. According to the Spokesperson, Kluth’s and Soros’s liberal defenders’ “desperate efforts to play the Jewish card” are aimed at “discrediting those who dare to oppose Soros’s pro-immigration, anti-democratic politics”, and intentionally disregard the true problem: respect for the will of the people.
“There is a difference between working to topple communist dictatorships, as Soros’s foundations once did, and acting against democratically elected governments, as Soros and his network do today”, he stressed.
Soros’s defenders would like to refer to him as a philanthropist, as someone who “gives away most of his money”, as Kluth says. However, they consistently ignore the fact that, as Soros himself admits, he is a political player with a radical political agenda whose standpoint, according to an interview for the Wall Street Journal, is “totally at odds with that professed by the current Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán”.
“He and the NGOs that depend on his financing have no democratic legitimisation to perform ideologically-driven activities in Hungary, particularly with relation to issues of national security such as immigration. Accordingly, Viktor Orbán is an open critic and unwavering opponent of George Soros, because Soros and his network have stepped onto the political stage aggressively to push for open borders and a pro-immigration agenda that in the most part goes against the will of the Hungarian people”, Mr. Kovács writes.