23 Dec 2024
Friday 18 September 2015 - 15:35
Story Code : 180903

Far-right hungarian mayor makes absurd anti-refugee action video

Laszlo Toroczkai is the mayor of Asotthalom, a town on the Hungary-Serbia border. If you're a migrant or a refugee seeking to enter his domain, good luck. He's out to get you.

In a YouTube video, Toroczkai, a far-right politician with a closely cropped haircut,lays out a warning to illegal trespassers. Any refugee who damages the boundary fence or enters against the law will be prosecuted and subject to a slew of penalties, including jail time.

The message is simple, and one that has been echoed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to tens of thousands of Syrian refugees and other migrants seeking to enter the European Union this year: Don't come here.

"Hungary is a bad choice," he says toward the end of the video. "Assothalom is the worst."

The video is propelled along with an energetic action-film score and shows Assothalom's police and paramilitary forces at the ready. Beefy men go on patrol on horseback; others jet down dirt roads on motorbikes. It ends with a panoramic shot of Toroczkai, standing in front of his refugee-denying A-Team.

The video underscores, to a certain extent, the entrenched attitudes of some Eastern European governments to the record influx of refugees and asylum-seekers this year. Orban has framed the arrival of so many Syrian refugees as a civilizational challenge to Hungary's Christian culture a dubious claim that flies in the face of the demands of Pope Francis.

A parody of the video, uploaded here, splices itsscore with scenes from this year's Hollywood blockbuster "Jurassic World."

Toroczkai is a leading figure inthe 64 Counties Youth Movement, a far-right, ultranationalist political organization that is closeto the influential Jobbik party. Its members believe in the restoration of "Greater Hungary" to its borders before World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

The politician's incendiary views have got him in trouble in the past. In 2008, Torockai gave a speech in a northern Serbian city with a large Hungarian minority and was later set upon and beaten up by five Serbs. He lost a tooth and suffered a cracked rib.

Authorities took him to a hospital and then to a police station. He was released and then banned from crossing the border into Serbia for two years.

By TheWashington Post
https://theiranproject.com/vdcawwn6e49nao1.tgk4.html
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