to power 60 years ago. An estimated 25,000 people attended an anti-fascist protest on Friday. October 15, organized by the center-left governing parties and several human rights and Jewish groups.
But at the same time concern remained over the pro-Nazi Hungarian Future Group, after authorities banned its planned demonstration in honor of Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szalasi in front of the regime’s old headquarters in Budapest, which is now the capital’s House of Terror, a museum dedicated to Nazi and Communist victims.
Szalasi and many other Arrow Cross members were executed after the war for war crimes.
"My grandfather was killed in this building," Anita Hargitai, a mother who came to remember with her three young children, said as she pointed to the former Arrow Cross party headquarters, the French News Agency (AFP) reported.
On Monday, October 11, the group’s leader, Diana Bacsfi, was sentenced to 10 days in prison for showing a "Heil Hitler" salute in public last week.
"We don’t tolerate fascism in any of its forms," Culture Minister Istvan Hiller told Friday’s crowd, thanking the protesters for their presence. He quoted Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel as saying that "the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference," news reports said.
ISRAELI STUDENTS
The Associated Press (AP) said Israel’s Army Radio reported that 1,500 Israeli students currently in Hungary also participated in Friday’s rally. Officials from the centre right Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Union, the largest opposition group, laid a wreath beneath a plaque remembering Gabor Sztehlo, an evangelical clergyman who rescued hundreds of Jewish children during the Arrow Cross’s rule.
"Starting in late 1944, he sheltered the children in the cellars of his home and cared for them after liberation until they were claimed by Jewish families or organizations," The Simon Wiesenthal Center added on its Internet website. "He was recognized as a "Righteous Among the Nations" in 1972," it said.
The ceremony came after the Hungarian parliament on Monday, October 11, unanimously adopted a motion condemning the Szalasi-led Arrow Cross government.
"BLOODTHIRSTY ENEMY"
"The Ferenc Szalasi-led Arrow Cross national socialist movement was the most savage, harmful and bloodthirsty enemy of the rule of law based on the respect for democracy, universal human rights and civic values," the motion read.
Hungary has been pressured to do more to fight anti-Semitism in the country, which as a close ally of Germany during most of World War Two when roughly 600,000 Hungarian Jews were massacred. Earlier this year Hungary opened central Europe’s first Holocaust Memorial Center. That event came shortly after thousands of demonstrators shouted anti-Jewish slogans and burned an Israeli flag.
The political debate on how far hate speech can go in the post Communist era was expected to continue. Hungary’s President Ferenc Madl last year vetoed one of Europe’s strictest laws on hate speech that would have given up to three year prison sentences to anyone inciting hatred against a certain group or community.
