The 2015-16 “European migration crisis” and its aftermath have given the centuries-old relationship between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia yet another twist. The more than a million, mostly Muslim, arrivals in the European Union have given mainstream politicians an opportunity to generate and exploit racist, xenophobic, and ultranationalist urges in the public, of the sort that had previously been the exclusive preserve of the extreme right. This successful vote-getting strategy hinged on disassociating ethnoreligious hatred, which Islamophobia is, from its most stigmatized example in Europe: anti-Semitism. Professing a fondness for “Judeo-Christian” values and for Israel became de rigueur for Islamophobic politicians wishing to remain, or become, “respectable.” The increasingly populist Israeli government has happily supported this trend, turning a blind eye to troublesome manifestations of past or present anti-Semitism among its new-found friends.
Nowhere has this process been clearer than in Hungary, infamous for “solving” the migration crisis by erecting a wire fence along its borders. In Hungary, anti-anti-Semitism and support for Israel is a sharp ideological dividing line – and perhaps indeed the only dividing line – between the governing “mainstream” FIDESZ party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and the notorious far-right Jobbik party, which remains unrepentantly anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist. This does not mean that classic, old-fashioned anti-Semitism is disappearing among the rank and file. Barely hidden under the cover of condemning anti-Semitism (and blaming it on Muslims) and of support for Israel, old anti-Semitic stereotypes thrive. Most obvious among these is promoted by FIDESZ’s hate campaign against the Hungarian-Jewish American financier, George Soros, and his support for NGOs and institutions that Orbán associates with “cosmopolitan” liberalism. The government officially refers to an imaginary “Soros plan,” allegedly aiming to de-Christianize and denationalize Europe, including Hungary. The parallels to old-fashioned anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are clear, even if the leaders of FIDESZ disingenuously pretend to be blind to Soros’ Jewishness and how much their voters are aware of it.
Crypto-anti-Semitism thus combines with anti-anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, in a discourse whose main target is not as much the Jews or even the Muslims as, ultimately, liberal democracy. Orbánism, or as Orbán himself calls it “illiberal democracy,” has gained friends among the enemies of open society world-wide, among the European and American Right but also in Israel and even in Muslim Turkey.
In Europe, top leaders in Austria and Bavaria are Orbán’s friends. Putin is a good buddy. The worst thing to do would be for the world to imagine that what is going on in Hungary is simply a manifestation of (wrongly) alleged East European obscurantism, isolated from and with no repercussions for the West.
The Wellington Review 