Hungarian Spectrum’s Éva S. Balogh has written an article criticising a portray of Dutch PM Mark Rutte by MIMC Organisation founding member and historian László Bernát Veszprémy, published on Mandiner.
However, Balogh has completely mistranslated a crucial part of Veszprémy’s article.
Balogh writes as follows:
“So, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, the portrait of Mark Rutte according to Veszprémy. Our amateur psychiatrist believes that there are at least two sources of the Dutch prime minister’s hatred of Hungarians. (…) (T)hese five years saw the arrival of more than 100,000 refugees, whose integration consumed all the energy of the prime minister. He was preoccupied with such mundane issues as women’s rights, the rights of minorities, and gender equality instead of building an autocratic political system as Viktor Orbán did.”(1)
In reality, Veszprémy wrote in his article as follows:
“(Rutte’s tenure) saw the refugee crisis, and up to 2018 the Netherlands took in more than a hundred thousand refugees through family unification. In the Dutch press – aside from a few small news portals or tabloids critical of migration – topics such as integration, the rights of women, the rights of sexual and religious minorities, issues of security are not raised. Those who raise these subjects are branded as extremists by the Dutch press, and some of them are subject to constant denunciations.”(2)
It is obvious from a comparison of the two texts that Balogh has mistranslated Veszprémy’s article, who not only did not criticise Rutte for being “preoccupied” with “women’s rights” and “gender equality”, but did the exact opposite, and criticised the Dutch PM for not dealing with these subjects.
Veszprémy has offered a clarification in an article published also on Mandiner,(3) but in an act of clear defiance against journalistic ethics, Balogh has not corrected her article.
Sources:
(1) https://hungarianspectrum.org/2020/07/20/for-mark-rutte-orban-was-just-background-noise/
(2) https://mandiner.hu/cikk/20200720_miert_gyuloli_mark_rutte_a_magyarokat
(3) https://mandiner.hu/cikk/20200731_valasz_balogh_s_evanak_kesz