The right-wing government of Hungary has faced severe criticism for their stance on refugees. In an effort to keep them away, the country’s administration has constructed a large border fence adorned with scarecrows made of carved sugar beets made to look like rotting human heads.
On Sunday, Hungarian MEP for the Christian Democratic European Peoples’ Party Gyorgy Schopflin, tweeted, “Human images are haram… pig’s head would deter more effectively.”
— Gyorgy Schopflin (@schopflinMEP) August 20, 2016
The tweet came in response to Andrew Stroehlein, European Media Director of Human Rights Watch, who tweeted an article regarding the sugar beet scarecrows, stating, “refugees are fleeing war & torture, Hungary. Your root vegetable heads will not deter them."
— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) August 19, 2016
Hungarian MEP Schopflin was strongly criticized for the tweet, which he claimed was not meant to be taken literally.
“An MEP spouting such xenophobic filth… You are an embarrassment to Hungary, to Europe & to humanity,” Stroehlein replied.
Schopflin quickly fired back that Stroehlein’s language was “beginning to resemble hate speech.”
— Gyorgy Schopflin (@schopflinMEP) August 20, 2016
Schopflin has refused to apologize, or back down from the issue.
In 2015, 146 of the 177,135 people who applied for asylum in Hungary were approved. Additionally, the country declared a state of emergency over the refugee crisis and deployed 1,500 security personnel to guard the Serbian border.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has refused to back down on the issue, as other nations criticize Hungary for not accepting their fair share of refugees. He has stated that he wishes to “keep Europe Christian.”
“We are experiencing the end of a spiritual-intellectual era. The era of liberalism. [This] provides the opportunity for the national-Christian thinking to regain its dominance not only in Hungary, but in the whole of Europe,” Orban announced last year.
