Monthly Archives: May 2013

Yakhont Story Unfolds Another Story

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Psychology

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Russia’s delivery of Yakhont missiles to Syria represents the fulfillment of earlier contract obligations but with updated guidance technology. [1]

In 2011, Israel Matzav noted of the Yakhont:

“Israel is the only one in the region the Yakhonts would be used against. However, because Iran is supplying (unofficially) the cash for the missiles, there is also the risk that some of the Yakhonts would end up in Iran for use against numerous targets in the Persian Gulf.” [2]

Add to that risk: Israel Matzav notes the new missile as having twice the speed of the old one (and, again, improved guidance).

How far does President Putin wish to go with supporting, essentially, Brigadier General Maher al-Assad?

I may not be paid enough (nothing, actually) to answer that question.

🙂

Above: March 16, 2013 – Anti-Assad protesters walk toward 10 Downing Street, London.

YouTube poster of the video “Thepeopleofsyria” notes, “What a shame, the world and the Media are busy with the length of the beards of the demonstrators in Syria, while they are forgetting about the length of the scud missiles of Bashar, which are coming down on the heads of women and children.”

* * *

I’ll take a little turn here — first confessing that I really don’t know how to answer the question I posed, which has two parts: 1) the fundamental psychology in personality supporting attitudes toward others; 2) dependent and co-dependent interpersonal relationships with significant others and closely associated constellations.

What is most known is Moscow’s antipathy toward “political Islam”, the continuing simmer of restive states-of-affairs in Chechnya, and Putin’s own desire to encourage what psychologists call “narcissistic supply”: i.e., he really doesn’t want to be “the bad guy” — consequently: he really isn’t.

Putin himself would not fire a weapon at mere passersby on a street corner.

Bad form, bad style, all of that.

Moreover, Putin seems to me to have his “back stage” and “front stage” self-presentation in better order, and he seems also to know limits, moderation, and restraint.  After all, he works with a whole Russian People.

His associate may not have access to that grace that is the expression of a different mirrored self.

It’s hard to tell.

In 2012, writing for The New York Times, journalist Anne Barnard punched this in toward the end of her analysis of the Assad family’s position:

“The Assads were raised by their father and their uncles — aggressive men — to believe “they were demigods and Syria was their playground,” said Rana Kabbani, the daughter of a prominent diplomat who knew them growing up.” [3]

In the west, people prefer to see their demigods with guitars, not armies, and they much prefer to hear them singing then to watch them writing laws for everyone else to follow.

In any case, it is not good to have too much power, which is corrupting, much less to exceed limits with it, which is damning.

Cited Reference

1. The Jerusalem Post.  “Report: Russia sends Assad ‘ship killing missile’.  May 17, 2013.

2. Israel Matzav.  “Russia provides Syria with Yakhont anti-ship missiles.”  November 23, 2011.

3. Barnard, Anne.  “No Easy Route if Assad Opts to Go, or Stay, in Syria.”  The New York Times, December 24, 2012:

Analysts in Russia, one of Syria’s staunchest allies, say that as rebels try to encircle Damascus and cut off escape routes to the coast, the mood in the palace is one of panic, evinced by the erratic use of weapons: Scud missiles better used against an army than an insurgency, naval mines dropped from the air instead of laid at sea.

Other Reference

ABC News.  “Asma Assad Makes Rare Appearance.”  Video.  March 17, 2013.

Babiak, Paul.  “‘Psychopath’ or ‘Narcissist’: The Coach’s Dilemma. Worldwide Association of Business Coaches, April 28, 2011.

Eshel Tamir.  “How serious is the P800 Yakhont threat?  Does it have a destabilizing effect on the Middle East?”  Defense Update, September 20, 2010:

The expected arrival of the P800 Yakhont supersonic anti-ship missile in Syria is considered the first serious attempt by Syria to directly challenge the Israel Navy since the 1973 war, when the Israeli Navy sunk five Syrian vessels in the first missile-boat engagement known as the ‘Battle of Latakia’.

Eshel, Tamir.  “Syria Receives 72 Yakhont Missiles from Russia.”  Defense Update, December 3, 2011:

December 2, 2011: Russia has supplied two Bastion coastal missile systems to Syria, concluding a controversial $300 million arms deal inked with the Syrian government four years ago.

House of Mirrors.  “Malignant Narcissist, Covetous Sociopath, Bully, Liar, Slanderer . . .”  May 28, 2011:  “For the narcissist believes that everything belongs to her, and if someone has a little of it, then she’s not getting all of it. Pathological greed, entitlement, and covetousness are what makes the malignant narcissist a dangerous predator.”

Khalaf, Roula.  “Bashar al-Assad: behind the mask.”  FT Magazine, June 15, 2012.  Lead: “They burn his effigy in towns drenched in blood by his security forces.”  Of the patchwork of stories I’ve thrown into this section, this piece, which is coming up on its one-year anniversary, may be the one most rich for insight into the political, psychological, and social workings of the Assad regime.

SociopathWorld.  “Why I hate narcissists.”  January 1, 2012.

Wikipedia.  “P-800 Oniks”.

FNS – Erdogan in Washington

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Fast News Share

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The fact is that Turkey has not faced a threat on the scale of the Syrian crisis since Stalin demanded territory from the Turks in 1945. In 2011, hoping to oust the al-Assad regime, Turkey began to support the Syrian opposition. But, thus far, this policy has failed, and exposed Turkey to growing risks.

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/syria-to-top-erdogans-washington-agenda

As posts go, this amounts to “carrying water” for well prepared and decently funded Washington think-tankers.  I would love to join them or assist with some online or library-bound portion of their research — I’m available! — but from 90 minutes northwest of downtown, the best I’m going to do is pass some immediately relevant political analysis, background, and news on to a few BackChannels followers.

“Gonna get somethin'” plays a strong part in motivating or driving each contributor to the Islamic Small Wars, which seem to me to be about control, influence, and power over the attitudes, beliefs, and self-concepts contained in the minds of others.

Young men conflate themselves with God (“God’s will”) in the dismal episodes of the Islamic Small Wars while old ones leverage related fears and uncertainties to enrich themselves: if only it were games — set out a pot of tea, go out to a pub afterward — the teams would be fighting over an empty drum.

* * *

Conflicts within the systems of “President-Kings” like that of Bashar Assad may have greater legitimacy and historic validity: tyrants get an even hand from God, sometimes living into old age like Robert Mugabe, sometimes, as with Muammar Qaddafi, they are not so lucky.

In Syria, the behavior of Maher al-Assad tells why: the depth of the absence of consideration for others sours everyone, and it gets so bad that either the more righteous opposition will persist or the more conscionable of the military will desist and turn.

Mugabe’s long run — he’s a lonely old bastard these days — may have been facilitated by his keeping Zimbabwe’s woes within the boundaries of Zimbabwe.  While there have been across time a steady trickle of refugees and their economic impositions in other states, “trickle” is the right word compared to the obscene numbers involved in displacement and flight in Syria.

Mugabe’s Zimbabwe has also not mouthed itself into the role of a belligerent with which neighbors must reckon.

All in all, Mugabe has sustained on his early military reputation (a story similar to Qaddafi’s as a junior officer who makes his mark in battle) a pretty good kingdom for himself, however degrading and impoverishing it has been for the greater portion of Zimbabweans.*

* * *

By comparison, the ghosts of the 20th Century — World War II, Communist Russia, the Cold War — haunt Syria, and they have come to life (“as if Hafez al-Assad was still running the country from his grave” said a Druze resident of the Golan last year [1].).

News of the collapse of the Soviet Union perhaps failed to reach the Assad family by way of business and military associates in Russia: why change a thing?

This published today in Al-Ahram Weekly:

We need to understand that the conflict in Syria is not essentially one between Shias and Sunnis. That is pulling the wool over people’s eyes. There is no division between Shias and Sunnis were communism exists — only one between believers and atheists. [2]

Again, I say, lol, it’s not “Charlie Wilson’s War” this time!

Obama and Putin have realigned (more on that later and in some other post), but Syria stresses an old architecture that isn’t really there to save it.

Such ghosts could summon the dead rivalry back to life as they are threatening to do today, and this notion may be reinforced by the concerns noted around President Erdogan’s visit.  

However, the Charming Colonel President King Putin is no longer secured in the way a Russian president would have been in 1990.  He and the Russian People — and today accompanied by the noise of such as Pussy Riot — have moved forward, onward, and westward, and there’s no dragging them back to all that came before.

Instead — and instead of either Obama or Putin stepping in it — Syria has been left to collapse, and that is what I think may be signaled by +92,000 dead today and +3.4 million displaced (combined IDP and refugee figures).

I also suspect what’s bothering the superpower leaders (and China’s not far from all of this either) is the content and shape of the next Syria, and because of the wildly varying character within the melange of loosely confederated social elements involved, they’re stuck on the engineering within the conflagration — the Powers may be in want of updated competitive stances or genuinely new relationships –and while they’re thinking about things and struggling to find or define a better Syrian culture aside the Assad legacy, the Syrian civil war and its effects expand.

Cited Reference

1. AFP.  “Golan Druze in bitter split over Syria bloodshed.”  Video.  July 28, 2012.  “Never in history have we heard of a national army or regime slaughtering its own people for nearly seventeen months . . . It’s as if Hafez al-Assad was still running the country from his grave” (says one interviewed Druze resident in the Golan).

2. Kocaman, Aylin.  “The power behind Al-Assad.”  Al-Ahram Weekly, May 17, 2013.

—–

*For example: “Zimbabwe’s statistical indicators for health and education were once among the best in Africa. But the political and economic crisis has brought rising poverty and social decline in its wake. The 2003 Poverty Assessment Study Survey II showed a substantial increase in poverty; between 1990 and 2003 the poverty rate rose from 25 per cent to 63 per cent.”

http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/country/home/tags/zimbabwe

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From Martin Himel’s Oeuvre – Abe Foxman — “It’s An Illness; it’s a Disease; It’s a Need to Hate Somebody” –

16 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Religion

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Television host, director, and correspondent Martin Himel has produced a body of work on bigotry.

I haven’t been methodical about selecting these clips from Mr. Himel’s YouTube page but to see these themes broadly collected and presented in one place in video should open eyes and hearts to the character of racist and religious hate.

&

&

&

Amazon lists two documentaries by Martin Himel available on DVD (however, I think I may have just snagged the last available copy of Jenin: Massacring Truth): Jenin: Massacring Truth; Confrontation at Concordia.

Himel’s work has been airing this month on the Canadian television station Vision TV: Jew Bashing (May 6 to May 27); Persecuted Christians aired on May 6 and may be viewed in Canada in its entirety on the site linked (the message I got in western Maryland: “The channel owner has prohibited viewing from this location).

Bummer, dude.

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FTAC – Post-Cold War Post-Soviet Syria Challenges Putin

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Europe, Middle East, Regions, Russia, Syria

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Through the Cold War / Soviet Era, the boundaries and mischief provided by Soviet –> Syrian –> Iranian bonds and similar arrangements produced both enmity with the west and a bulwark against it even though the basis for, say, Soviet and Iranian existence would be wildly different (but not so different with the Soviet : Baathist relationship elsewhere). The ghosts of the Soviet Era have play in Syria’s disaster today: in essence, post-Soviet, post-KGB Russia seems to have maintained its business and military relationships with Syria without influencing or updating the political and social arrangements of the earlier state of affairs, except to better enable the capital interests of a ruling class. Enter Colonel President King and Stakeholder Putin today: how would you have him now address the Assad family (keep in mind he has his own “kleptocratic” track record within key Russian industries), Maher Al-Assad (who has launched jets against the innocents of whole communities and rather only haphazardly found the armed elements arrayed against the family), and fend off the de facto acquisition of another Chechnya?

I happen to think, perhaps alone in this, that Obama has been trying to goad Putin into intervening in Russia’s client state, but neither Obama or the U.S. have “true interest” in Syria: the focus of activity in Syria is (Shiite) Iran, and into that space KSA, with ample investment in U.S. capitalism (with Big Defense contracts, it’s we who are working for them), has handily played its rivalry with Iran for regional influence.

From both humanist and political perspectives, no one knows how to “sort” the collection of civil and religious interests engaged in conflict within Syria, and no one from outside, including bordering state armies like Suleiman’s wishes to step into the furnace (not the best analogy coming from a Jew, but it seems to work). Instead, we would rather have UNHCR beg for $1 billion through the end of the year to address the civilian tragedy attending Syria’s civil war and unresolved hatreds and threats attending western identity and interests.

Syria is Putin’s problem, and while he can and has, I think, embarrassed Obama with it, he hasn’t rolled out a good strategy yet for his modern, post-Soviet state.

One more thing: Putin may have himself for a problem as regards his own narcissistic universe and the at least partial detachment of that from human suffering within his reach. Syria is a hard problem for him, and it’s important the unfolding story of the state’s themes do not serve to dishonor or embarrass him in history.

—–

Some interests are known: Obama’s mom-and-apple-pie bid for a new Syrian secular democracy; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s interest in establishing greater autocratic Sunni-based influence in the region; Israeli reduction in Iranian-backed capability and hostility in general.

What we do not know are post-Soviet Russian interests in Syria today beyond continuing the archaic economic system chaining funding from Iran –> Syria –> Russia.

That system is up and running.

The old motivations are down and the current set are plainly absurd.

Russia, wary of its experience with Chechnya, has zero interest in otherwise supporting or strengthening Ayatollah Khamenei.  In essence, President Putin and the Russians have come to a crossroads in Syria, and they can’t go back, unless perhaps to the age of the czars minus the validation of religion for doing so (but mountains of cold hard cash may suffice for validation these days), and going forward, they’re a bit uncomfortable with us Yanks and perhaps lots of others on the Continent.

The longer Putin peers down the new routes available to him without stepping forward, the more he may contribute to the New World Disorder so signaled by the failure of the Assad family’s Syria to secure their citizens lives (casualties so far: 82,000; combined IDP and refugee figures: 3.4 million homeless).

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FTAC – Fast Note on Syria Dark Star

14 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Israel, Middle East, Regions, Syria

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One alternative hypothesis: NATO has been trying to goad Putin into taking ownership of what is a long-neglected Russian client, i.e., update the relationship in the post-Soviet era. That didn’t happen. Instead, with the gates to an unbridled capitalism open, the family picked up all the chips it could get and Russian business and military plus oligarchs got something out of the new deal too — just the people got screwed.

Cultural attitudes and beliefs have independent political effects. Whether with the Baloch or Syria, altruistic intervention and sacrifice demand a goodness within and an outcome in goodness achieved as perceived by those who would help. For both Russian and NATO interests, outcomes leading to continuing dictatorship or religious fascism, the prospect of either, keep the superpowers both at bay and apart. Where are the people other people would want to put into power?

That’s where the hesitation is.

The world would rather put $1 billion in the pot for UNHCR than produce a unified response in Syria. However, the conflict is so awful and wrong in so many ways, it’s sucking energy into it — first the wave of democratic revolutionaries, then the sectarian fighters and extremists, then the more powerful states of the world who can’t figure out how to approach it or organize it or help it organize itself in a way that has more positive effects for Israel, frankly, and the region in its totality.

In its most dismal aspect, Syria is reflective of a war in the head, essentially, and of its integration in regional and international states of affairs. A disaster, a dark star, a sucking black hole that holds and pulls in killers while displacing its population (82,000 casualties to date; 3.4 million IDPs and refugees to date).

I don’t know if any of this expressing make any difference at all.

Six million dead in the Holocaust (please, don’t deny it).

Three-point-four million homeless today in relation to Syria’s civil war.

Those are big numbers around which to wrap our heads.

I can barely imagine what it must feel like to wake up as, say, UNHCR staff responsible for drawing up plans and a budget for some portion of the millions of souls for whom Syria has failed to provide basic security.

The Jews know every life has its legend and know this no less so for Syrians, but heroic altruism necessarily stalls at the wall of hate and cannot do much beyond attending to the closest injured.

http://unitedwithisrael.org/seven-syrian-refugees-treated-in-hospital-in-northern-israel/

Humanity has fled Syria.

One hopes it will rediscover its better aspects soon, but then I type naturally with rose-colored glasses.

Brief Reference – One Story – Qaradawi in Gaza

14 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Pamela Geller’s tweeting got my attention a few minutes ago with a story highlighting Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s latest anti-Semitic and one-hundred percent (by way of Hadith) Muslim remarks:

Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi: “Our whole ambition is to die on the path to Allah… I am sure we will conquer” said Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, as he touched down in Gaza on Wednesday for a three day solidarity visit. Before he left on Friday he told a Muslim Brotherhood rally that Israel had no right to exist. The rally was the scene of mass chanting of “liberate Palestine … from the sons of monkeys and pigs”.

Why stop with one source of comment on the tone of the latest from the Islamic Small Wars?

A quick look-up brings up journalist Abeer Ayyoub’s report noting how Qaradawi’s visit to Gaza highlighted the divisive relations between Fatah and Hamas.  Ayyoub made no mention of the cleric’s inflammatory and vicious remarks about “The People of the Book”.

What would Mohammad have said about that?

Perhaps “Give up telling lies first and always speak the truth.”

By western standards, that would be a truth told clearly, accurately, and completely.

Writing for The Telegraph, Alan Johnson played it straight with the header “Ken Livingstone’s favourite Islamist spreads Jew-hatred in Gaza” before going on to note within-camp criticism and discomfort with the cleric’s visit, including this gem: “As for Gaza itself, the local beleaguered journalists boycotted the visit in protest at recent vicious Hamas assaults on their colleagues.”

Ken Livingstone, a former First Mayor of London, “has positioned himself on the hard left of the Labour Party,” according to his Wikipedia entry.

They are so easy to boot, those British hard lefties.

Here is Livingstone in action (April 19, 2008):

The want of accommodation, of course, comes from a common good soul, and we should all want to live and let live.

However, be that as it may, responding at the time, “Spacecowboy95” quoted “Qaradawi on the Jews”: “Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.”

Is Qaradawi Muslim or not?

Is he to be taken at his word?

Is his word representative or not?

At any point, one might dive for “shimmer” (the term’s listed on a new page on this blog: “Coins and Terms“), but clerics ranting like Qaradawi drown out other Muslim voices: they are telling Jews and others what Islam has in store for the Jews, today, now if it could do it, and the Jews and others have learned to take such delusional, impious, malignant, misguided, narcissistic, and self-indulgent expression seriously.

We know where it leads and where it will take the world again if unbridled.

In a related dissent from Britain’s left, self-describe left winger Peter Tatchell posted on Harry’s Place last week, “When OutRage! and I protested against Qaradawi being hosted by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, in 2004, much of the so-called “left” denounced us as racists, Islamophobes, imperialists and neo-cons. Sick! I’m a left-winger but nowadays too many leftists are apologists for Islamism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and homophobia.”

No need to take Tatchell’s word for it as regards the line taken by the subject of interest:

Is there an arguable, authoritative, consistent, dependable, powerful, and reliable repudiation within Islamic thought to match Qaradawi’s script?

Such questions may be left to Islamic humanists, also the growing portion of Muslims who themselves become the targets of bomb-setting militants and self-appointed takfiri.

As things stand in Gaza, the Gatestone Institute notes, “Had the Muslim Brotherhood’s al-Qaradawi visited the Gaza Strip to urge the Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to exist, he would have been received with shoes and rotten eggs.”

Reference

Ayyoub, Abeer.  “Visit by Egyptian Cleric to Gaza Divides Palestinian Leaders.”  Al-Monitor, May 13, 2013.

Geller, Pamela.  “Spiritual Leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Qaradawi: “Battle is not driven by nationalist causes or patriotic belonging: it  is rather driven by religious incentives, it is between Muslims and Jews as is clearly stated in the Hadith.”  Atlas Shrugs, May 14, 2013.

Johnson, Alan.  “Ken Livingstone’s favourite Islamist spreads Jew-hatred in Gaza.”  The Telegraph, May 13, 2013.

Tatchell, Peter.  “Qaradawi is an anti-Semite.”  Guest post.  Harry’s Place, May 8, 2013.

Toameh, Khaled Abu.  “Al-Qaradawi and the New Religious Conflict with Israel.”  Gatestone Institute, May 14, 2013.

The Devolution Will Be Televised

14 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Psychology

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  • A killer-soldier, allegedly of the Free Syrian Army, knifes the heart out of the chest of a battlefield casualty and bites into it.
  • In numerous videos: beheading.
  • From combat footage: jading, numbing recordings, from clinical green-screen Apache strikes to anti-tank weapon and RPG-abetted tank kills.
  • In the news: the aftermath of bombings of every kind.

And you are there!

Watching.

Already this morning — by 5 a.m. — I have either seen or been shown (both) drone footage of Taliban types planting a roadside bomb and, a day later, footage of an army vehicle being blown up at the same spot (while what looks like a mine sweeper stands off about 25 yards ahead of the blast).

Could have been a training clip, a how-not-to, punched up online as “testimony” to defense contracting conspiracy.

* * *

About ten years ago in the forums of a completely unrelated industry (fashion photography), some then idiot posted a link to the green screen cockpit recording of an attack against Muslim terrorists transferring weapons out of the back of a pickup truck.  Outside of Hollywood, which had the inside track on the look of night vision technology, few civilians had ever seen anything like it, and the clinical “range control” chatter and aim-and-shoot routine may have added to the outrage of aesthetes and tall girls.

Ah, those were more innocent days!

The imaginative wonders supplied by Stephan King notwithstanding.

🙂

It seems yesterday’s idiot would be a great — and entertaining! — Facebook buddy today.

* * *

The ever present advanced guard of sophisticates might argue that the world is the world, dude, get used to it.

No problem.

I have gotten used to it, and, dude, that’s the problem.

* * *

As we drink the world through our eyes and ears planted before hundreds of millions of computer monitors and gadget screens, should we wonder about the depth of our own depravity and jadedness in our having sought, perhaps, to see and hear too much?

Setting out to “track” conflict and related themes, whatever the motivation*, necessarily involves turning up unpleasant media and engaging as witness and commentator with the tragedies of the day, but one needs also to defend one’s humanity, more specifically an empathy with others, a sustained sympathy for the suffering, a whole response to encounter, even and especially online, and that as opposed to a clinical, jaded, and numbed reduction to political or other engineering devoid of sentiment.

So here I may be ready for some extended web-free “R and R”.

The Internet won’t care if I absent it awhile: it is a cold medium, more the invention of engineers than of poets, more the province of marketers, programmers, and pollsters intent on dipping into lives and pockets for gain than of artists and scholars delving into language and exploring the contours of the heart for a greater good.

—–

*Between advanced degree work in English and social psychology, a stint within the Office of Naval Research (public affairs environment, no clearance), enthusiasm for writing, and a well rounded American experience, I happen to think I’ve been cued and cut out for this sort of thing.

Associated Reference

BBC.  “Outrage at Syrian rebel shown ‘eating soldier’s heart’.  May 14, 2013.

Postscript to the World Jewish Congress in Budapest by Karl Pfeifer

13 Monday May 2013

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“Last autumn Prime Minister Orbán defined the Hungarian nation as an ethnically pure group held together by kinship and blood rather than by language and culture: “We are born into the myth of the Turul-bird just as we are born into our language and our history.” A crazy notion considering that there are no ethnically pure Hungarians. But it helps you to label all those who do not believe in the pagan foundation myth as “Jews”.

Eva S. Balogh's avatarHungarian Spectrum

Is the World Jewish Congress (WJC) a gathering of useless busybodies (“gittegylet” in Hungarian after Ferenc Molnár’s novel, The Boys of Paul Street) as the liberal Budapest weekly Magyar Narancs claims? An association of useless busybodies could never have gathered 500 delegates in Budapest for the occasion.

Is the WJC an entity that controls the governments of Israel or the USA as Hungarian conspiracy theorists claim? You must have lost any sense of reality to believe that.

Well, insofar as there was a discussion inside the WJC whether it was right to hold a meeting in Budapest, I can state that the conference was a clear and definite success. Rampant anti-Semitism and racism in Hungary have become the center of attention of the international media. All the delegates and journalists received a 20 page brochure entitled “Anti-Semitic Incidents in Hungary 2012” documenting the present situation.

When Orbán spoke about…

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