TRANSCRIPT - CNN- "GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE" (GPS) JULY 31, 2022]
Fareed gives a history lesson on Hungary and its diverse roots, after Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in a speech that he does not want Hungary to become a "mixed-race" nation.
ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. This coming week at the influential CPAC conference in Dallas, alongside Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and more than 20 Republican members of Congress, conservatives are welcoming a foreign leader, Hungary's Viktor Orban.
I wonder if Orban will give a version of his latest major speech in a spa town in Romania last weekend he warned that Europe was in danger of becoming a mixed race world. A trend, he said, Hungary had always resisted. "We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed race," he said.
Someone needs to give Orban a lesson in Hungarian history. Scholars have found that the conquerors who alighted on modern day Hungary in the ninth century migrated from as far away as southern Siberia and with the genetic relatives of central Asians, Caucasian, and Slavs.
The Hungarian language is completely different from than that of its neighboring countries deriving from the Ural region with similarities to Finnish and Estonia. And a DNA testing firm found that of nearly 5,000 Hungarians who took their test 7.5 percent had at least a quarter Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, the highest prevalence the firm found in any country outside of Israel. So the idea of some sort of pure Hungarian race is a fantasy.
Orban's comments last week don't just defy history, they fly in the face of the core feature that has historically made his own country great. Remember, Hungary was an equal partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which was among the most diverse territories in human history.
As the scholars Paul Miller-Melamed and Claire Morelon wrote in the "New York Times" it had at least 11 officially recognized languages and a multiplicity of religions including Catholicism, Judaism, Islam and various forms of Orthodox Christianity. Its bureaucracy, its army and its schools were all multilingual. When the mobilization orders were given to the army to attack Serbia in 1914, they were given in about a dozen different languages.
The empire's two seats of government, Vienna and Budapest, were two of the greatest economic and cultural capitals of the world, magnets for minorities who flourished in them. But Orban seems to have a very specific focus for his current ire. His speech last weekend singled out a very specific group, Muslims. He said, menacingly, "Islamic civilization is constantly moving towards Europe."
This is a common refrain for Orban. Last year, during the speech in Budapest he said that while he supported neighboring Bosnia's bid to join the E.U. it would be complicated by one snag, the existence of the country's 2 million Muslims.
And, again, Viktor Orban is turning a blind eye to history. Muslims have been present in Europe since the 8th century when the Umayyad dynasty conquered must of the Iberian Peninsula, which they called Al- Andalus. The Ottoman expanded to southeast and central Europe at the height of their power and attempted but failed to capture Vienna twice. Islam has been in Hungary for about a millennium and actually ruled parts of the country in the 16th century.
[10:55:01]
Today, however, Muslims make up 0.4 percent of the population of Hungary. That is some threat.
There is a gruesome history surrounding rhetoric like Orban's in his own country. It is what led in the 1930s to the passage of some of the harshest laws against Jews, the revived minority at the time, mostly copied from the Nuremberg Laws in Germany.
Hungary had a Jewish population of over 800,000 in that period. Today there are just about 100,000 Jews in Hungary. One of Orban's own aides resigned in disgust in his latest effort at race-baiting, describing the speech as a Nazi text worthy of Joseph Goebbels. If there are still honorable conservatives left at CPAC they should disinvite Viktor Orban and distance themselves from his poisonous message.
Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.
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