Europe’s Capital of Anti-Semitism
I hate Hungarian Nazis…
Budapest Experiences A New Wave of Hate
Budapest survived fascism and communism and blossomed after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Now the Hungarian capital is experiencing a rebirth of anti-Semitism. The far-right Jobbik party is part of the government and Jews are being openly intimidated.
The city was always good for drama — for intrigues about life and death, for eternal love and murderous betrayal, for torture, political heroism and sexual escapades. Founded by the Romans, improved by the Mongols and oppressed by the Ottoman Turks, Budapest has reinvented itself time and again, flexible in the flux of time. It has also served as a laboratory of sorts for varying political ideologies, from National Socialism to fascism to communism.
The United Nations has named four spots in the city UNESCO world heritage sites: the panorama on the Danube River embankment, the Buda castle district, the Millennium underground railway and Andrássy Avenue. The Hungarians wanted to use the magnificent boulevard, which was designed and built as part of preparations for the nation’s mythical millennium celebration in 1896, to demonstrate that they had assumed their rightful place in the center of the continent. The country fell to the Nazis 40 years later. The Arrow Cross Party, a Hungarian national socialist party briefly in power from October 1944 to March 1945, was still driving Jews into extermination camps after Adolf Eichmann, the “architect of the Holocaust,” had already fled.