With the conflict in Gaza at a tenuous point, a Holocaust-denying Hungarian lawmaker thought the next logical thing to do would be to ask the government to draw up a list of Jews who pose a national security threat. Because, really, what could go wrong with that? "I think such a conflict makes it timely to tally up people of Jewish ancestry who live here, especially in the Hungarian Parliament and the Hungarian government, who, indeed, pose a national security risk to Hungary,"  Márton Gyöngyösi, deputy group leader of the radical-nationalist party, told Hungarian parliament yesterday. Which of course sounds an awful lot like Hitler in the Holocaust, when he said that Jewish people were the biggest enemy of the German people, often referring to Jewish people as the "Jewish Enemy." Gyöngyösi, according to Politics.hu, a self-described Hungarian non-partisan daily, is sort of into sounding a lot like a Nazi apologist — as in July, when he lashed out at the idea of investigators searching for Nazi war criminals in Hungary, and in January, when he was accused of being one of those whackadoodles who believes the Holocaust did not exist.

Needless to say, that did not go over well, as Reuters points out that 500,000-600,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust. And Politics.Hu reports that Gyöngyösi's latest comments came on the day before a "major conference on hate speech organized by the Council of Europe was scheduled to open in Budapest" where billionaire George Soros will be speaking.

"The government strictly rejects extremist, racist, anti-Semitic voices of any kind and does everything to suppress such voices," the Hungarian government's spokesman said in the Reuters report, apologizing for Gyöngyösi . 

For his own part, Gyöngyösi is trying to smack together an apology as well. "I apologize to my Jewish compatriots for my declarations that could be misunderstood," he said, and Reuters points out that he wanted to make clear that he was only specifically referring "to citizens with dual Israeli-Hungarian citizenship." Right. 

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Alexander Abad-Santos