Budapest – A Hungarian journalist known for making antisemitic and racist comments was a featured speaker at a Friday gathering in the Hungarian capital Budapest of prominent conservatives from the United States, Europe and elsewhere.
Zsolt Bayer, who according to The Guardian has called Jews “stinking excrement,” referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people, took the stage on the second day of the American Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, as it was held in Europe for the first time.
The two-day conference featured speeches from former US president Donald Trump; Fox News host Tucker Carlson; Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows; and Republican lawmakers from Florida and Maryland.
Bayer is a co-founder of the ruling Fidesz party and is said to be close to Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the star speaker at CPAC. He has long angered Jews and others with his articles and op-eds in right-wing publications.
In 2011, Bayar used the phrase “stinking excrement” to refer generically to Jews in England, according to The Guardian.
Two years later, writing about a New Year’s Eve bar fight in which several people were seriously injured and some of the attackers were identified as Roma, Bayer wrote: “A significant part of the Roma are unfit for coexistence. They are not fit to live among people. These Roma are animals and they behave like animals.”
In a November 2015 column about the migrant crisis and extremism, Bayer said all Muslims older than 14 were “potential murderers.”
Bayer was distinguished with the Knight’s Cross in 2016 for his writings about the Hungarian minority in Transylvania, the fates of Hungarian prisoners in the Soviet Gulag prison system and for his “exemplary journalistic activities.”
