Beating up Jewish boys in Budapest...


I didn't know things in Hungary have deteriorated to this stage. Here are excerpts from George Szirtes' blog:

1. (England)

...Yesterday I was working with a party of Hungarian Jewish students from Budapest. Because most of the boys were wearing a yarmulke I assumed this was a real orthodox group. Their teacher explained that if they wore a yarmulke on a Budapest street there was every likelihood they would be physically attacked. The boys were, he said, enjoying the freedom here of being able to safely wear their yarmulkes in public...

2. (Hungary)

...We are in Budapest since the 15th of March. We saw the rallies & herds with masks& Arpad-sflags & Molotov cocktails.The political situation is disastrous. It's not a deadlock any more, it feels like an inevitable fall into an abyss.

I hope I'm wrong.

It's very cold & windy, sometimes it snows & then the sun comes out; it's a relief, but not a genuine one, everybody knows. The city is full of bad tension, but stilll, still, is full of broken beauty.

I travel from one end to the other, register the changes, the losses, the new elements. See friends, talk through the night, or we meet in coffee-houses & have fast, very dense conversations, because time is short & we are afraid of breaking the fragile perfection of the encounter.The Danube is angry & powerful, green-grey-brown...

...Of course, the people beating up the Jewish boys in Budapest are actually protesting against Zionism and the cruelties and injustices of the fascist Zionist entity. I mean, who knows, those boys might emigrate to Israel, join the Israeli army and become settlers. Or they might know some people who might do that.

Reading these bleak passages one gets the feelng that the Holocaust never happened. It is as if history has opened its hungry bloody mouth and swallowed the tremendum, not to be seen or heard about or remembered... its lessons buried deep in the incontinent need to hate the Jews.

More depressing is the sure knowledge that nothing can stop the contagion now.

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