Yesterday, the Forward revealed that White House aide Sebastian Gorka endorsed a Hungarian paramilitary group, The Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard), that was created by Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary), a neofascist political party that Gorka has worked with in the past.
Gorka, who is also reportedly a member of a Hungarian group that worked with Nazi Germany during World War II, is a senior adviser to President Trump on security issues.
As noted in the Forward, the militant group is notorious for promulgating anti-Semitism and instigating violence against Roma people:
The Guard was well known for its members’ anti-Semitism. Members often attended memorial ceremonies for World War II-era Hungarian fascists. In a 2008 speech, István Dósa, who served in the Guard as a high-ranking captain, referred to Jews as “Zionist rats” and as “locusts” while also discussing “Zionist-Bolshevik genocide” and calling Hungarian Jews “nation-destroyers.”
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The Guard was formally banned in 2009, with the country’s highest court ruling that its anti-Roma marches violated the rights of the Hungarian Roma community. In 2013, two of its members were found guilty in a string of racially motivated murders of Hungarian Roma, including the killing of a 5-year-old, committed in 2008 and 2009.
In 2013, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Hungary’s unusual blanket ban on the group was legal. “The movement’s activities and manifestations were based on the racial conflict between Hungarian majority and Roma minority,” the court ruled.
One Jobbik politician called for “the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a ‘national security risk,’” and the party has especially targeted Roma people for harassment, frequently railing against “Gypsy crime.”
Along with attacking Jewish and Roma people, Jobbik and the Guard are also virulently homophobic.
Jobbik tried to make the “promotion” of homosexuality a crime punishable with hefty prison terms and called on the government to ban pride parades, many of which have been beleaguered by right-wing violence. The party even “proposed criminalizing public expression of homosexuality” and tried to have “the right of assembly to be denied to those” who support same-sex relationships, with one of its lawmakers railing against “anti-human, deviant homosexuals.”
Trump, who pledged to “protect” the LGBTQ community from “a hateful foreign ideology,” seems to have no problem hiring a far-right extremist to be one of his top advisers.
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