Nerenberg: Canadian comfort to "hateful" Hungarian fascists?

Thanks for posting this, lagatta. I had the fantastic opportunity to stay with Karl during our recent staff retreat in Ottawa and he took me on a tour of parliament. Even Irwin Cotler approached him to commend his work on defending and publicizing the plight of the Roma.

If the World Jewish Congress President Ron Lauder’s words were not sufficient to give the Canadian Immigration Minister pause, he might want to consult recent news reports on a Hungarian Member of Parliament’s proposal that Hungary’s Jews should be registered on lists as “threats to national security.”

Or, Kenney could consult the respected German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, which just days ago, explained how Hungary’s extreme right Jobbik Party – the party, to use Kenney’s words, of “nutbars” – has successfully pulled Orban’s respectable, governing Fidesz Party into race-hate territory.

 “In reality,” Der Spiegel reports, “Fidesz has moved ever closer to the positions of the right-wing extremist Jobbik party, partly to lure voters from the right and partly out of conviction. In September, Prime Minister Victor Orbán held a blood-and-soil speech on Hungarian values that bordered on right-wing extremism in the southern Hungarian village of Ópusztaszer on the occasion of a memorial dedication. In May, Hungarian Parliamentary President László Kövér took part in a memorial for the writer József Nyírö, who was a leading cultural ideologist for the Arrow Cross. In Hungary's current national curriculum for its schools, the works of several anti-Semitic authors are listed as recommended reading.”

The unavoidable truth is that granting safe Designated Country of Origin status to any country will not be a mere technical administrative matter.

It will inevitably have far-reaching political consequences.

There can be almost no doubt that the minute Canada bestows the honour of “safe” country on present-day Hungary there will be defiant cries of victory from that country’s violent militias and legions of admirers of 1930s and 1940s style Fascism.

It might be an unintended consequence; but it should not come a surprise to Jason Kenney and this government.