This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.

In late 2003, the verdict of incitement against Lóránt Hegedüs Jr, a Reformed Church minister who headed the extreme right wing Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP) list for the 2004 European Parliament elections, was annulled.

Hegedüs was tried in 2002 after publishing an article in the local MIÉP organ of district 16 of Budapest (Ébresztô, which means wakening) in which he invited his readers to exclude the Jews, whom he referred to as ‘vagabonds from Galicia’. This was a disparaging reference to the thousands of east European Jewish refugees from Galicia who flocked to Hungary in the late nineteenth century seeking a better life.

Hegedüs was given a suspended sentence of 18 months for “inciting hatred against a community.” He became an instant hero of the MIEP, as well as of the conservative right from FIDESZ rightwards (see here and here.)

David Irving has made several trips to Hungary, where there are no laws against those who deny the Holocaust. Loránt Hegedüs Jr was his host, and it was in Hegedüs’s church that he spread his ideas.

On November 26, Hegedüs was once again acquitted in a session, closed to the public, of an ecclesiastical Court of the Reformed (Calvinist) Hungarian Church, arising from the fact that the church for which Hegedüs Jr is responsible in the center of Budapest was let out to the Gede brothers, editors of Nazi and Arrow Cross “literature”. According to the ecclesiastical Court, such a business relationship does not offend against the good reputation of the Church.

The Hungarian Reformed Church has known for many years about the blatant antisemitism of Hegedüs. He was charged only after this case became known abroad.

There are members of the Reformed Church who are shocked by the activities and declarations of Hegedüs. But there are - as this decision shows - many others in that Church who defend him.

Read Karl Pfeifer’s new essay on Austrian antisemitism and the left, Victim Competition, on Z Word.