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.”
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."
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.”
“Your words are disgusting. I would expect that from anonymous neo-Nazi trolls, but you’re an MEP. Act like one,” Schopflin stated.
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.
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