Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] POLLS AND ANTISEMITISM IN POST-COMMUNIST ROMANIA 419Russia and revisionist Horthyate Hungary as outlets for the externalizationof guilt. Yet while some self-propelling nationalists such as Tudor occasionallydistance themselves from the Iron Guard (though freely print itspropaganda in the publications they disseminate), other self-propellingnationalists, such as historian Gheorghe Buzatu, collaborate with the nostalgicsin the Iron Guard cleansing operation.The leader of the New Generation Party (PNG), George (Gigi) Becali,belongs to the category labeled “neo-populist mercantile antisemites.”Becali is an “instinctive” neo-populist politician seeking to gain power frombelow by whatever possible means. His model appears to be former Italianprime pinister Silvio Berlusconi. Like Berlusconi, he is a highly successfulbusinessman and Romania’s second-richest man. Also like the Italianleader, he owns the country’s most popular soccer team—in Becali’s case,Steaua Bucharest. Unlike Berlusconi, however, Becali lacks any formaleducation, and, again, unlike him, he is on record as occasionally utteringantisemitic remarks.When journalist Keno Verseck reminded him of the Iron Guardist anti-Jewish pogroms, Becali countered:We are not a people of criminals. When I watch those movies with theJews, I cannot believe that Romanians, my people, did such things.Never! The Romanians are simply not capable of that. This is why I donot believe that a Holocaust has ever taken place in Romania. 66When the list of PNG candidates for the 2007 European Parliamentelections was released, it included “historian” Alex Mihai Stoenescu andformer PRM parliamentary deputy Vlad Hogea. Both are notoriousantisemites and Holocaust deniers and/or trivializers; Hogea is also onrecord for racist positions targeting the Roma.In a multi-volume book entitled Istoria loviturilor de stat în România(History of State-Strikes in Romania), Stoenescu tells his readers that in itsbeginning days, the Legionary Movement was by no means antisemitic—“Captain” Corneliu Zelea Codreanu “was not born as an anti-Semite, but asan anti-communist leader.” The movement became so, however, when itrealized that the many Jews who at that time attended Romanian universitieswere leftists and thus carriers of the Bolshevik threat. 67 Even so,Stoenescu claims, it is wrong to describe the movement as right wing just66. Keno Verseck, “Gigi Becali: Die Schafe haben mich stark gemacht,” DerTagesspiegel (Berlin), May 25, 2008, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/zeitung/Sonntag;art2566,2536698.67. Alex Mihai Stoenescu, Istoria loviturilor de stat din România, vol. 2(Bucharest: RAO International, 2002), 415-416.