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By Larry Cohler-Esses October 11, 2017

George Soros is “Satan.” And his agenda is one that “from its heart hates Christian Europe’s traditions and civilization.”

The word “Jew” was never uttered by two high-profile Hungarian officials in their recent remarks attacking the Hungarian-American hedge fund billionaire and philanthropist. But their message, redolent of classical anti-Semitism, rang out from the country’s parliament and its national radio station, respectively, last Sunday and Monday.

In a speech entititled “The Christian duty to fight against the Satan/Soros Plan,” András Aradszki, the government’s secretary of state for energy, framed his ruling party’s long running campaign against Soros for the first time in explicitly theological terms.

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Linking Soros to “abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and the forced politicization of gender theory,” Aradszki declared from the floor of Hungary’s parliament Sunday, “The Soros mercenaries do not cite the Holy Father’s thoughts on this.”

He added: “Soros and his comrades want to destroy the independence and values of nation states for the purpose of watering down the Christian spirit of Europe.”

Citing an alleged plan by Soros for to forcibly settle “tens of millions of migrants” in Europe, Aradszki declared, “The fight against Satan is a Christian duty. Yes, I speak of an attack by Satan, who is also the angel of denial, because they are denying what they are preparing to do — even when it is completely obvious.”

Under Fidesz, a hard-right nationalist party, Hungary’s government is preparing to send out questionaires about Soros to every citizen in the country in what it calls a “national consultation” on the alleged threat he poses. That itself is a run-up to national elections scheduled for the spring.

Aradszki termed the national consultation “an outstanding opportunity for us to make our opinions known about Satan’s Soros Plan.”

The following day, Zsolt Semjén, the government’s deputy prime minister, commented on the support by Soros and his Open Society Foundations for, as an Open Society spokesman put it, “more coherent and humane policies for helping to resettle migrants fleeing oppression and violence in their homelands.”

“Look at this migration,” said Semjén on Kossuth Rádió, the government’s national radio station. “Fundamentally, the root of this hundreds of years ago started from Freemasonary’s inspiration, which later had a Jacobin version and a Bolshevik version, and one of its many branches is the Soros-type extreme-liberal thing, which from its heart hates Christian traditions, the Christian Europe’s traditions and civilization, and if possible even more hates the nation-states”

Semjén is the leader of Hungary’s Christian Democratic People’s Party, which is aligned with Fidesz, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, in a ruling coalition.

The explicitly theological terms of the officials’ criticism of Soros appeared to mark a new phase in the increasing intensity of the attacks on him.

“As far as I know this is the first time that theological terms were used” in attacking Soros, said Eva Balogh, the editor of Hungarian Spectrum, an on-line daily analysis of news from Hungary published in America. “Most Hungarian commentators seem to be convinced that Aradszki got the text from above.”

Balogh, a former instructor in East European history at Yale University, said that those who observed Aradszki’s speech “comment on his emotionless delivery…These people stress that he had difficulty putting his words together.”

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