Németh Zsolt bocsánatkérésre szólította fel az Index-et mivel az elsőre antiszemitának nevezte Roger Scrutont. Később az Index "leantiszemitázott"-ra javította a cikkét.
Most tekintsünk el Bayertól, Lovastól, Tőkéczkitől, Döbrentei Kornéltól, a 888.hu-tól, attól, hogy az újfideszes ideológus Békés Márton a nyíltan antiszemita szárszói beszédet magasztalta és a Harmadik Birodalom című protonáci művet példaként emlegette.
A Scruton-botrány 2019 áprilisában tört ki, amikor a New Statesman egy interjú alapján ezt a cikket hozta le róla. Ezek után Scrutont kirúgták a tanácsadói állásából (nem fizetett állásról volt szó). Az újság később lehozta az interjú teljes szövegét. Ebből világosan látszik, hogy itt szó nincs antiszemitizmusról.
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GE: And then on the other side you accuse them of anti-Semitism for your use of the term “Soros empire”.
RS: Is that what I did wrong there? Well, I was talking about Hungary at the time wasn’t I? And anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts. It’s not necessarily an empire of Jews, that’s such nonsense, how can one possibly deal with that?
GE: What’s your view of Orbán? Do you think he’s misrepresented in the press?
RS: To some extent he is. I have a complicated relationship with Orbán because I helped him set up his free university in Budapest in 1987 before the collapse of communism, when he was a young man, and he and his colleagues were doing a fantastic job, that’s when they started Fidesz. I told them at the time that you shouldn’t make it into a youth party because you’re not going to be young forever, you should make it into a constitutional conservative party of the old school, then you’ve got a real tradition to build on, and that’s what they did. And it was all going pretty well, but I think power has gone to his head. He has huge charisma and he’s made some decisions which are very popular with the Hungarian people because the Hungarians were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East. You have to remember that their history with, their relationship with Islam is not a happy one. So he made those radical decisions that we’re going to exclude all this, we’re going to maintain the security of our borders come what may. And that’s put him at loggerheads with the European Union, so he’s got the whole propaganda machine to deal with. But I don’t say that I agree with his policies in general. I think he’s getting too close to Russia. But he’s also being deliberately isolated by the European Union, which is not in my view a wise thing. It’s the same problem as we have with the European Union: how do you negotiate something other than what’s being dictated to you?
GE: He is, of course, regularly accused of anti-Semitism.
RS: That’s nonsense though in his case, well I assume it’s nonsense. The Hungarians, what I said in the speech that people quote from was, is true. I said there’s a legacy of anti-Semitism in Hungary which you can’t deny. You have to recognise that if you’re going to form any kind of coherent idea of what Hungary is as a nation. It has a large Jewish population who’ve got to be included and this was one of the great strengths of the Austro-Hungarian empire, that it gave to the Jews a sense of national identity as well as their ethnic and religious identity, and that’s what’s in danger of being lost because of the Nazi takeover and then the Communist takeover, which was also all part of that. So you should never ignore the possibility of anti-Semitism and the situation of the Jew in Hungary if you want to have a nation state. And I think Viktor is aware of that. He’s done a lot, with Holocaust memorials and all that sort of stuff, to include Jews in his particular form of national politics, but it’s not surprising that they don’t necessarily want to be included. And it’s not surprising if they join up with Soros’s transnational campaign against Orbán. It’s such a complicated matter. All I would say is that there is no easy solution to this but it’s not a case that Orbán is anti-Semitic. He is trying to find his own solution and if you had a political movement in Hungary which excluded the Jews in some way you’d be damn foolish because they’re the ones with the minds. The Budapest intelligentsia – many of them are Jewish and they have inherited a long history of political thinking, which has been extremely useful to previous generations of Hungarians.
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Világosan kiderül azonban, hogy itt volt egy korábbi botrány is. Az alábbiak egy jóval korábbi Scruton-szövegből valók.
“Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire. People in these networks include many who are rightly suspicious of nationalism, regard nationalism as the major cause of the tragedy of Central Europe in the 20th century.”
