Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s hard-line immigration policy has been vindicated amid the terror attacks and demonstrations witnessed across Western Europe in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel earlier this month, a leading U.S. conservative journalist has claimed.
In an interview with The Critic, U.S. editor and author Rod Dreher told the magazine’s executive editor Sebastian Milbank that Orbán had been proven right in his decision to oppose mass migration from the Arab and Muslim world, citing the pro-Palestine protests and the rise in anti-Semitism experienced across many European nations.
“One thing I can say about Budapest is that, whatever else is happening in Europe with radicals in the street, Islamists on the street causing mayhem, it doesn’t happen in Budapest,” Dreher said.
He explained that in the aftermath of the Hamas terror attack on Israeli territory on Oct. 7 in which 1,300 civilians were slaughtered, “an intelligence analyst friend back in Washington texted me and said that we were about to see the vindication of Viktor Orbán’s migration policy, and he was right.”
Dreher, who recently moved to Budapest after falling in love with the Hungarian way of life, noted that “tens of thousands of people across Europe turned out to support Hamas.”
Although qualifying this observation by stating he does not equate supporting the Palestinian cause with supporting Hamas,” he added that “it seems to me that in the days immediately following the butchery in Israel, to go on the street and demonstrate generally in favor of the Palestinians, with no criticism at all of Hamas, I think this is a distinction without a difference.”
Dreher praised Orbán’s “firm decision going back to at least 2015” to oppose the European Union’s liberal migration and asylum policy.
“Orbán said, ‘No, we can’t take that here.’ He was viciously criticized as racist. Well, I think we see what my friend in Washington is saying has been proven true,” he said.
“The fact that Jews in Budapest are safe to walk the streets, as they are not in London, in Paris, in Stockholm, shows that Viktor Orbán was right,” Dreher added.
[pp id=49216]
Dreher has long been supportive of the Orbán administration and its championing of what some describe as illiberal Christian democracy and has often criticized those back in his country of origin for chastising Hungary’s alternative approach to that of other liberal Western nations.
“It is a country that is really denigrated and slandered in the American and Western media, so it will be a great pleasure for me to be able to introduce Hungary to as many American conservatives as possible, as well as to place Hungary at the center of the American conservative dialogue,” the U.S. journalist said in an interview with Kossuth Rádió back in September last year.
