The recent terror attacks in Dagestan are only some of the many signs that Russia is facing a real threat in terms of radical Islam in the Caucasus. In October 2023 a crowd of Muslim fanatics besieged the Makhachkala airport in search of Jews. The antisemitic riot which led to sixty people being arrested left the airport with smashed windows and injured policemen.
The story begins in 1994, when a Texas pastor and his wife, leading by example, persuade the members of the congregation to take into foster care orphaned or severely abused children nobody else would want.
‘If we Europeans want to keep up with the Americans, we Europeans must become great again,’ Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán emphasized in an interview with German newspaper Berliner Morgenpost. PM Orbán also praised former US President Donald Trump for his pro-peace stance regarding the war in Ukraine, and spoke about his beloved sport, football, as well.
The staging of the musical version of one of the most popular young adult fiction works ever written in Hungarian, titled Be Faithful Unto Death, was a major undertaking and a dream come true for the initiator of the project, Bernadett Csizmadia. The show was performed on the 50th anniversary celebration of the Széchenyi Hungarian School and Kindergarten of New Brunswick, NJ.
US Ambassador David Pressman is being true to his own self: in a recent interview he accused the Hungarian government of lying, stating that during the campaign before the European Parliament elections, government politicians falsely claimed that NATO would drag Hungary into the war in Ukraine.
‘If everyone agrees on everything, it presents a strange vision of a democratic society,’ remarked German journalist Ralf Schuler during the launch event of his latest book, published in Hungarian by the Center for Fundamental Rights. The book delves into the themes and perils of the herd mentality that is increasingly prevalent in Western societies, drawing comparisons with the era of socialism.
‘From a sovereigntist standpoint, we need a rule of law conception that doesn’t concede any authority over domestic affairs to supranational organizations and international bureaucracies. Eurocrats instrumentalize courts to promote their federalist agenda through seemingly neutral rulings about the rule of law. A sovereigntist approach to the rule of law should also include the protection of national courts’ authority. We need a rule of law conception that protects national constitutional identity.’
Albeit on Monday the public was informed that only Tibor Kapu and Gyula Cserényi have been selected as the astronauts for the programme, the other two candidates who had been included in the final round of selection, clinical orthopaedic surgeon Ádám Schlégl and aerospace design engineer András Szakály, will nonetheless assist with the work of the HUNOR mission in leading positions on the staff of the mission’s ground-based control centre. As for Kapu and Cserényi, they will soon be sent to the United States, where they will undergo the final phase of their training, supervised and assisted by the US space agency NASA and the private company Axiom Space, Hungary’s international space exploration partners.
‘Being a conservative in Berkeley is like you’re surrounded by Marxists. I think sometimes Hungary feels the same, surrounded by these European progressive elites,’ John Yoo, former US government official and Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley stated in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
Former US President Donald Trump, the current Republican presidential candidate, spoke about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in a recent interview, praising the latter’s pro-peace stance on the war in Ukraine. Pro-peace voices are needed more than ever in Europe, as Western leaders prepare for the crucial June elections amid a state of war psychosis.
‘The more I travelled in America, the more I realized that there is no state in the U.S. where Hungarians have not created something lasting; where there is not some Hungarian thread, some Hungarian history, some Hungarian contribution. We wanted to visualize this centuries-old creative process and make it easily accessible to the widest possible audience. That’s how the idea of the HuGo app was born, and of course it took years to fine-tune the concept with our developers arriving at the publicly available version we have today.’ Anna Smith Lacey on the HuGo app and the power of the community.
At the weekly government press briefing last week the Hungarian PM’s chief of staff, Minister Gergely Gulyás stated that Hungary would not enforce the ICC arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu. He declared that it is not appropriate to use a court as a political tool, and it should be remembered that the ‘utterly ruthless, disgraceful and despicable terrorist attack’ suffered by Israel was the root cause of everything that is happening in the Gaza Strip.
In truth, “the long arc of harassment, assault, and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance, and abetment by Israeli officials”, states The New York Times. This is not to downplay the terrorist threat against Israelis by Palestinian jihadists. However, interviews with more than one hundred people—current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police, and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership—there appears to be a long history of crime without punishment.’
The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has sought arrest warrants for several leading Israeli politicians and members of the Hamas political leadership, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Allies of Israel, led by Viktor Orbán and Joe Biden, have described the prosecutor’s decision on the Jewish state’s leadership as absurd and shameful.
Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian President and a potential successor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, were reported dead following a helicopter crash in the northern area of the country on Sunday. The European Union, China, and Russia have already expressed their condolences, while the United States had remained silent at the time of writing. Israeli officials stated that the Jewish state was not involved in Raisi’s death.
Instead of condemning the law that protects Georgia’s sovereignty, the EU should consider adopting similar measures, Balázs Orbán argued in his X post. On Tuesday, the Georgian parliament passed a law mandating registration for organizations that receive substantial foreign funding, triggering significant outcry in Brussels. However, the law, disparagingly labelled as the ‘Russian law,’ bears similarities to the Foreign Agents Registration Act in the United States, which has been in place for nearly a century.
‘The progressive side has created a “Jewish question”. The left has discovered the concept of race, merged it with other dimensions of oppression (class, gender), and now they have made the Jews into a new oppressive caste alongside Christian Protestants. After 1967 they focused only on “Zionists” and “Israelis”; now the Jews of the diaspora are the opponents. They don’t even hide their intentions, attacking synagogues, looking for “enemies” who “look Jewish” in the classrooms and in the corridors. The attacks have nothing to do with Israel: they are intended to intimidate the Jewish American community.’
‘Hungary insists on following its own path: it stands up for its sovereignty, it defends families, its borders, and its economy. At the same time, it is open to the world, and wants to engage with all players around the globe, which includes skilfully attracting investments from the East, including Asia. But it does not want to lecture other countries; it does not want to be on bad terms with other countries, and it does not want to get into ideological debates. It wants growth, it wants security, and it wants peace.’
‘Horrible wars are going on right at this moment in the world, and no one in the West seems to care that much. Why does something happening in the Middle East make such repercussions and make emotions run this high in Western universities? What is the ‘secret appeal’ of taking the side of the Palestinians in the Israel–Hamas war that inspired so many students in Ivy League schools to go out and protest in the way they did? May it be the case that it is the schools themselves that generate false narratives of the history behind this conflict to manipulate students into an inevitable conclusion?’
Despite the increasingly hawkish rhetoric from President Emmanual Macron of France, the French Ambassador to Russia did attend President Vladimir Putin’s fifth inauguration. So did Ambassador Konkoly of Hungary, and the envoys of four other EU countries as well.
‘One of the problems with the Anglosphere is that we have these occasional bouts of hysteria. It’s a sort of psychosexual, cultural, religious frenzy,’ American writer James C. Bennett highlighted in an interview with Hungarian Conservative.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed the decree expanding the country’s martial law on 23 April, which, in practice, means the derogation from certain obligations undertaken by the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The new decree also includes limitations on the consular services that Ukrainians can access abroad if their military registration documents are not updated.
It was an initiative where expert breeding and handling on three different continents that made this incredible success possible. Cudar, the third-placed Kuvasz, was bred in Brazil, with a Hungarian heart. Now living in America, it came back to Europe to demonstrate to the world the beauty, values and power of this incredible Hungarian breed.
‘When you move abroad, either of necessity or at your own initiative, the inevitable clash between the host and home cultures raises questions about the future of your mother tongue, culture of origin, and national identity. In a foreign language environment, the use of the mother tongue is not obvious, nor is the development and preservation of the original identity.’
‘Viktor Orbán is the one standing up for the average European people, not their government,’ Republican Congressman Andy Harris pointed out in an interview with Hungarian Conservative on the sidelines of CPAC Hungary 2024.
‘Hungary has the ability to initiate some proposals to its neighbours regarding what steps to take to reduce the harmful effects of the war. The region needs to agree on what the long-term interests of its countries in the region are in the shadow of the war in Ukraine,’ China’s foremost political scientist holds.
The Chinese scholar observed that whereas technological advancement—from the telegraph and 5G or from the industrial revolution to the digital age—progresses linearly, global politics exhibits ‘retrogressive’ dynamics or regression. The First World War was a regression in comparison to the calm times of before it began; the interwar years were a period of growth, while the Second World War was also a regression. In his view, the current era also represents a step backwards.
‘First, cannabis was licensed for medical use, then legalization became more widespread. It is the typical slippery slope. In fact, there are doors that, once opened, cannot be closed. Society-shaping (disruptive) philanthropists like George Soros, who have been at the forefront of making drug use easier for decades, know this all too well.’
‘The politicization of science is a terrible thing. In the Stalinist period, the ideological pseudo-science of Trofim Lysenko destroyed Soviet genetics research. Lysenko’s fraudulent scientific theories about plant genetics coincided with Soviet ideology, and received Stalin’s full backing. Russian geneticists opposed to Lysenko stood denounced as ‘human haters.’ Many were fired from their jobs and sent to prison. Though Lysenko fell out of favor after Stalin’s death, Russian genetics research still has not fully recovered from its ideological ruin. It remains to be seen whether or not America can avoid a similar fate.’
Iran launched an unprecedented air strike against Israel on Saturday night. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán reacted by convening the Defence Council on Sunday. The PM reassured Hungarian families that the government is committed to protecting them should the conflict escalate.
Hungarian Conservative is a quarterly magazine on contemporary political, philosophical and cultural issues from a conservative perspective.