The Jewish Community federation Mazsihisz on Friday condemned a public broadcaster’s airing of a anti-Semitic rhetoric against the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire George Soros, and the state news agency MTI's silence about it.
The state channel MTVA's news program 'Hirado' on Wednesday ran a feature on Soros which included quotes by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, calling Soros “an evil Zionist-American multi-billionaire” and stating that the businessman was responsible for destabilizing former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s government.
Mazsihisz, the umbrella group of Hungarian Jewish communities, condemned the inclusion of this quote by Khamenei, which it said echoed the purest and most common form “of anti-Jewish sentiments in the Hungarian extreme-right media.
The community's statement also noted that the MTI state news agency had declined to quote Mazsihisz’s statement or report about it, expressing concerns that it might “damage the credibility of the state media and its business interests.”
Mazsihisz declared: "We find very concerning that the evening news program of the public TV channel quoted the infamous, anti-Semitic and anti-Westerner Iranian ayatollah as a credible source... This kind of public speech cannot be tolerated and our fellow citizens must be informed about."
The statement added that "we expect from the Hungarian government that it shall require the state controlled media to observe the constitutional principles," including zero tolerance toward anti-Semitism.
Zoltan Radnoti, the chairman of the rabbinical council of Mazsihisz, also condemned the anti-Soros rhetoric on public television, labeling it “anti-Semitic incitement during primetime."
Even before the broadcast, the campaign against Soros was “not free of anti-Semitism and should be stopped in order to prevent hatred,” Radnoti said. “The hatred which is now spread with taxpayer money.”
