Orban and Netanyahu: the transnational Right’s pervasive Islamophobia
Viktor Orbán’s obsequious letter to Benjamin Netanyahu offering him sanctuary from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hungary is not a surprise. It is another red flag in the Islamophobic world of the transnational Right. The mass and prolonged slaughter of Palestinian Muslims (and Christians) cannot be seen as a crime committed against other humans in this worldview. The bloodshed must be revered as a form of “moral courage” in defence of the West.
At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference (ARC) in London last year, one attendee told Rod Dreher that Hungary is our “Israel.” Rightwing circles were depicting protests on British streets against the Western-aided Israeli violence as an existential threat. Soon, Dreher’s interlocutor meant, “Christians” would need to seek sanctuary in a state that repelled Muslims and other non-White people.
Rod Dreher is an American ultra-reactionary who converted to Catholicism, and then to Orthodox Christianity when Rad Trad Catholicism proved too soft. He has moved to Budapest. There he interacts with a circle of Westerners around Orbán-funded think tanks. Another of the intellectuals in the circle is John O’Sullivan who has been instrumental to funnelling Orbánism into Australia through the Quadrant Journal where he remains International Editor. Nick Cater, The Australian columnist and Atlas Network junktank apparatchik, has just spent the northern summer in Budapest as a guest of the Orbánist organs, following Tony Abbott and Greg Sheridan.
Both Dreher and O’Sullivan were drafters of the National Conservative (NatCon) Statement of Principles alongside Israeli Jewish Nationalist Yoram Hazony. They incorporate Hindu Nationalists into this movement, and the three religions are made to stand in for “race.” This coalition targets Muslims as the eternal Other that cannot be incorporated into the broadly “Western” world.
Ethnic cleansing statements and actions accompany the civilisation clash propaganda.
And NatCon (alongside interconnected organisations like ARC) cannot be dismissed as peripheral. NatCon and ARC both boast prominent political actors, thought leaders, junktank affiliates and big money amongst their supporters. Peter Thiel is a signatory of the NatCon statement. JD Vance’s Vice Presidential nomination was soft launched at the latest NatCon conference.
The ARC Advisory Board includes John Howard, Tony Abbott, John Anderson, Amanda Stoker and Andrew Hastie amongst its numbers. ARC co-founder John Anderson hosted fellow Board member and divisive activist Douglas Murray on his influential YouTube channel last year. Over one million people have viewed the grim piece of hysterical fear mongering about Muslims.
Also on the Board is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is undoubtedly genuine in her personal trajectory from Muslim to atheist to Christian. It is coincidence that the older New Atheist promotion of Islamophobia has given way to a new religio-ethnonationalist movement where Christians are joined by Jewish and Hindu nationalists in demonising Muslims. Hirsi is one of their tools.
Another Board member (and funder) is Evangelical Brit Paul Marshall, who was disgraced last year when his Islamophobic twitter use was exposed. He now owns The Spectator as well as investing in media platforms including Britains’ Fox News: GB News. Hirsi was hosted by Marshall’s Unherd publication, speaking about the importance of her conversion to Christianity and the “fragility” of the West which must be “defended” against Muslims. (Unherd, like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, is represented in the NatCon signatory list. Hirsi is also connected with NatCon.) This conversation has just been boosted into wider anglophone thought space by the Intelligence Squared podcast, as just another opinion in the marketplace of ideas, rather than the funnelling of harmful prejudice.
The conversation with Hirsi dwells extensively on the decades-old attacks that marked the beginning of the “war on terror.” The focus works to amplify Murray’s ideas that the West harbours jihadis if it harbours any Muslims within its populations.
In this propaganda movement, the vast variety of Muslims around the world is reduced to stereotypes and enemies. This genteel-washing of bigotry promotes sympathy in the chattering classes for the conspiracy-infused hatred fostered by online influencers. It promotes acceptance of violence against Muslims.
Israel’s continuing and gruesome persecution of Palestinians is concealed by a Western sense that Muslim lives do not matter. Our politicians do not dare to confront the bloodshed in any but the most mealy-mouthed fashion. The mainstream media barely covers the facts to prevent politicians facing the appropriate mounting horror at our complicity in these crimes against humanity.
In Britain, Yorkshire Tory MP Baroness Sayeeda Warsi has just published a book called Muslims don’t matter. In discussing the growing threat to British Muslims being promoted by Tory politicians and rightwing media, she explains that British Muslims with the resources to afford it are exploring whether they need to invest in sanctuary properties overseas to escape to when the growing bigotry in Britain becomes too dangerous to ignore.
They might be sensible; we look back at Jewish people in 1930s Europe now and wonder why many did not emigrate when the signs became so foreboding.
The fact that mainstream politicians and media echo the talking points of scoundrels who promote dehumanising bigotry is shameful; it emerges slightly sanitised in these spaces making such opinions a valid choice for the influential actors of the professional classes. They mouth polite iterations of the shocking bigotry of the grievance-filled “gammons” on social media.
In Australia, the same unalloyed focus on Israel’s rights is conveyed regularly in the pages of The Australian. Attempts to confront the bloodshed, the intentional starvation and deprivation, the overt planning to “cleanse” and settle Palestinian land, receive thundering condemnations of moral cowardice in those pages. For The Australian, Muslim lives apparently are not human lives, but merely an impediment to Israel’s safety and goals.
It would be grim indeed if this dehumanising of Muslims exists primarily for the pursuit of the goal of resource extraction, continuing a long tradition from the blood-stained beaches of Gallipoli.
NatCon, ARC and the Orbán sphere are all interconnected with fossil fuel interests. Murdoch’s campaigning for Israel seems not unconnected to fossil fuel too.
The ICC (like the UN, the EU and other transnational bodies) is rejected by the contemporary Right. Such entities constrain corporate action as well as rogue nations’ efforts to harm their inhabitants or neighbours.
For Orbán, as for Murdoch columnists, it is crucial to discredit any action that harms the religio-ethnonationalist (and resource) project that the movement has made central to its identity politics. They work to discredit any body that threatens to hold the Israeli government to account.
In doing so, they illustrate that there is no limit to the number of Muslims who can be killed to achieve their goals.
This was first published in Pearls and Irritations
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Return to home pageOK, move to Hungary, the bloody lot of you. And stay there.
Fortunately we here in Australia are not in the morally and ethically moribund “West” but in the South… aren’t we??? Hello-oo,Penny? Hello-ooo, Anthony? Can you say GENOCIDE???
“It would be grim indeed if this dehumanising of Muslims exists primarily for the pursuit of the goal of resource extraction, continuing a long tradition from the blood-stained beaches of Gallipoli.”
So close … and yet …
“if”? There’s no “if” about it.
The dehumanising of Muslims is definitely all about the pursuit of resource extraction.
Why does Lucy have so much trouble saying exactly what the problem is?
This is not about Orban. Or the transnational Right.
This chaos, this dehumanising, has been central to the acquisition of power and influence by the liberal democracies for as long as they have existed. Lucy’s Gallipoli reference confirms that.
Was Orban on the beach at Gallipoli?
Lucy is deflecting.
The current conflicts in West Asia are all about control of resources and trade routes. But to state that openly, is to unmask the liberal project.
Manipulative, grasping, greedy people have always been with us, but they only flourish when given the means to do so. Our financial/economic system gives them the means.
The world forced them to give up their colonial possessions, so they modified the global financial system.
They created financial institutions and financial instruments backed by a global network of military bases, to allow for continued dominance and exploitation. And just as the world ended colonialism, it can also end neo-colonialism.
It was not always so. Control of a ruthless entrepreneurial class is not a new problem. We only have to look back at our own history to solve this.
But there’s resistance to looking back at history, because an honest examination of the development of the modern world, an honest examination of the dehumanising of Muslims, leaves liberal democracy exposed and naked, with every wart and blemish, lie and slander, plunder and genocide out in the open for all to see.
Orban is barely a player at the margins.
This is not about Orban.
Tone the Botty made a DISGUSTING tweet where he applauded Israel and said that it was showing us how to fight. I knew that Tone the Botty was a fucken idiot, but I didn’t think he’d be THAT stupid! I am equally appalled that the evil Potty Boy Dutton would say that he wouldn’t rule out cutting ties with the ICJ and only this week that Australia had abandoned Jews here by voting along with 156 nations (Hungary voted no) to condemn Israel’s actions. There are Jewish people in Australia, some of whom are my friends, who oppose what Israel is doing. Potty Boy is nothing more than a stinking hypocrite!
It would be entirely in character for a scoundrel like Netanyahu to seek exile in a place like Hungary as international law finally catches up with him.
I would be happy to contribute to his airfare – off you go Bibi !
Netanyahu should have been liquidated umpteen years ago, by his own citizen institutions, for known crime. He is a dedicated supremacist ultratriumphal superstitionist illogical, criminal operator, totally deluded, above and below normal behaviour, chosen and blessed for criminality, foul fraudy filthite. A chosen race in a promised land is a sick lie, a criminal position, ages old and always divisive.
Netanyahu is stoking the war flames only because it is keeping him in power. He will try to stay there by progressively attacking all of Israel’s enemies. The IDF claims the right to attack other countries on the basis of self defense, but it is never just “an eye for an eye” rather a response with enormous interest. The IDF keeps on releasing statements claiming they performed precision attacks on premises in other countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc., based on intel that they housed operatives of Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., or weapons.
Why isn’t the world asking for proof?
Divide, conquer, subjugate, rip out resources, but pretend it’s about the contest of belief systems, and the ‘wrong thinking’ of other cultures and ethnicities, vs the obvious supremacy and righteousness of the ‘West’ and those that aspire for them.
The usual lies and garbage for a bunch of murderous exploitative haters.
Just came across a great quote from an article by Eugene Doyle published today at Pearls and Irritations.
““Western justifications for their barbarism is well-established – after all, genocide is a Western liberal value.” Professor Joseph Massad.
Our PM is currently being given a lecture on how to behave by a crazed head of State on the wanted list for war crimes, and genocide.
I think Putin is on there too, with the rocket man from North Korea, but they lack the credentials for a daily bulletin.
He is a bit special, but we dont pass judgement on his mental capacity, and makes out that he worships the sky fairy who is his and his alone. His tribe goes back to the stone age he will reveal, and the business plan has remained unchanged over that time.
We all know he wont stop at murder to acquire a bit more real estate, and Albo assures him that he could not have a better friend than Australia.
Its well known that you are judged by the company you keep, and to show such a poor taste in this one simply makes us a laughing stock on the world stage
Good as always, is it a deep seated belief or a cynical political strategy masking corruption, personal and regime fragility?
Both Orban and Netanyahu are not well known for being pious or religious, but are surrounded by people who are, or pretend, and being opportunistic.
The anti-semitic and Islamophobic ‘Soros conspiracy’ promoting the ‘great replacment’ was from the GOP trained US consultants Finkelstein and Birnbaum, who had worked for Netanyahu and he recommended them to Orban.
They and others are cornered and cannot afford to lose or relinquish power in fear of legal issues, and worse; Netanyahu coalition is dependent on religious RWNJs and Orban regime taking over institutions (while centre & left argue).
Analysis from Europe on Israel-Gaza is different from the Anglosphere, ie. far more nuanced, acknowledges complexity and issues leading up, including Putin; IDF-Hamas a fight between two corrupt codependent narcissistic and authoritarian regimes which have no empathy for their own citizens.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine months before had stalled, needed a breather and resupply (Iran/Nth. Korea), had met Hamas Septmeber ’23, then domino effect with Houthis, Iran etc., but the disproportionate blow back from Israel was not expected; outcome?
Divisive political agitprop for US RW media, low info and faux anti-imperialists (following Kremlin talking points) to blame a long term issue on Biden, Harris & Dems, disappear Trump, Islamophobes & anti-semites (plus Kushner, MBS et al), then divide Muslim vote and campus students; few weeks ago all the repetitive pro-Palestinian social media noise (ex some authentic accounts), just stopped once Trump prevailed?
Now Erdogan who apparently loathes &/or competes with both Putin and Assad was complicit in or behind the recent fall of Aleppo in Syria….while others accuse Putin in the past creating migrations to Europe 2015…. benefitted many including Brexit.
On related about illiberal regimes, much transnational action which is missed by Anglo media, those who should be challenged on their ‘foreign agent’ activities, but are not?
Lucy is aware, DeSmog UK/US had Hope Not Hate’s Peter Geoghegan asking out loud why Anglo ultra conservatives are not scrutinised by the Anglo RW MSM….eg our own Tone’s at the Danube Inst. in Budapest and PM ‘mini Putin’ Orban’s anti-western, anti-NATO and anti-EU friends?
DeSmog Oct ’24 ‘
‘Given David Frost and Tony Abbott’s declarations about the importance of freedom, surely they are concerned that Orbán’s Fidesz party has taken de facto control of 80 percent of the country’s media and has systematically undermined the rule of law?,” said Peter Geoghegan of Democracy for Sale.
Neither responded to DeSmog’s requests for comment.’
https://www.desmog.com/2024/10/11/donald-trump-viktor-orban-allies-gather-anti-green-event-hosted-heritage-foundation-danube-institute-project-2025/
(Ian Dunt’s Origin Stories podcast also has fascinating deep dive into Netanyahu)
Jews are finding it tough in Australia, and telling them to “Toughen up princess” is probably not going to work.
They are a bit delicate, and exceptional, in all sorts of ways.
However in a moment of pure genious I worked out a solution.
Peter Dutton cant rely on his nuclear power generators to hand him the top job, but his fall back could be the Jewish vote, and he certainly has taken up their cause.
So to raise his Jewishness, Peter should invite Netenyahoo to visit Australia and to stand up in our parliament and tell us how we should all behave.
Bibi could fall for it?
Dutton has certainly gone into bat for the Jewish vote and demanding that Albanese declare the synagogue fire as an act of terrorism was quite bizarre – only bodies such as the AFP can determine whether an act of vandalism can be classified as terrorism. Our laws delineate what constitutes an act of terrorism :
An Intentional act :
The act is done with the intention of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause.
For Dutton (and Paterson) to screech over the airwaves that the PM is failing in his duty not to immediately denounce this as terrorism completely ignores the fact that it is not for a politician to make these determinations.
The AFP have now pronounced the fire to be considered an act of terror and the appropriate machinery and legal processes can now go into action.
Does Dutton win some Jewish votes after this performance ?
Incidentally I note that Dutton has refused to do his press conferences with an Aboriginal (or Torres Strait) flag in the background. Another performance prank on his part. Will he like Abbott gradually have more and more Australian flags (with the British Flag in the corner) featuring at each appearance he makes ? It’s all performances with this bloke.
Really, what is the point of Peter Dutton ?
In a policy vacuum, Dutton’s only recourse is to sow discontent and division.