The following article by Remix News is pure fearmongering with the false claim that all Palestinians are terrorists! 🙄
New immigration disaster? 3 ‘conservatives’ pushing the US and Europe to accept Palestinian refugees
Notes about Remix News:
Remix is published by FWD affairs LLC, Budapest, Hungary. Remix is funded in part by the Batthyány Lajos Foundation in Budapest.
Another English-language propaganda news site from Budapest:
Finally, Remix News, published in Budapest, covers news from “Central Europe, the Visegrád countries of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia” by providing “a curated selection of what’s trending daily in the local media of the region.” The managing editor is John Cody; he is assisted by a Hungarian and a Polish editor. Remix is published by FWD Affairs LLC.
The managing editor of FWD Affairs LLC is Patrick Egan, an American. We know practically nothing about this public relations and communications firm, except that it is situated in Budapest, has fewer than 10 employees, and has inactive Facebook and Twitter accounts (nothing posted since 2019). It claims to help clients, both business and government, develop their strategic narrative and message and tailor it for their international audience. As for Egan himself, he graduated from the University of Oregon in 1991 and Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 2001. Between 2001 and 2004 he was regional program director for Freedom House in Budapest, then for six years was country director for the International Republican Institute, where he spent most of his time in Bratislava.
Egan’s close relationship with Fidesz goes back many years, even to the time when Fidesz was still in opposition. In 2007, Zsolt Nyitrai, the operative director of Fidesz and a member of parliament, who for a number of years kept a blog going, noted on August 30, 2007 that he was on his way to Zagreb to attend a workshop on campaign tactics at the invitation of Patrick Egan, the representative of the International Republican Institute. More recently, he has appeared quite frequently at Fidesz-organized political affairs, including panel discussions at the annual Fidesz festivals in Tusnádfürdő/Băile Tuşnad. He was also a member of a high-level panel in the House of Terror on “What is Trumpism,” with such Fidesz luminaries as Mária Schmidt, Balázs Orbán, and István Gyarmati.
It was in 2010 that Egan established FWD Affairs. By 2015, FWD Affairs had signed contracts for communications work with Antal Rogán’s propaganda ministry, one of which might have been the job of creating an internet site for the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ/UDMR) called “Transylvania Now.” Recently he was also chosen to be on the faculty of the newly established Magyar Diplomáciai Akadémia, a compulsory school for those who want to represent Viktor Orbán’s Hungary abroad. According to Magyar Narancs, Egan will be responsible for “presentation exercises,” whatever that means. In brief, over the last few years, he has steadily become an important player in Orbán’s world of propaganda.
Patrick previously specialized in strategic consulting, working with governments, technology companies, and public affairs groups in over twenty countries in Europe and the Middle East. For the work he did as Country Director of the International Republican Institute to increase voter participation in Iraq’s 2005 national elections, he received a commendation from Secretary Condoleezza Rice.
Freedom House is a U.S. government-funded organization linked to the CIA that functions as a foreign policy tool by aiding “regime changes“. It also makes ‘freedom indexes’, creating an academic patina on what would otherwise be known as propaganda; these ‘facts’ can then be quoted by the press and academia as a reliable source to de-legitimize opponents.
International Republican Institute:
The International Republican Institute (IRI) is one of the main components of the regime change organization National Endowment for Democracy (NED); that is, NED channels its funds through four organizations, and IRI is one of them.
Hungarian gov’t money, US advisor with Republican ties behind propaganda news site:
But there is much more to learn about Egan, who has strong ties towards the US Republican Party and its formally non-partisan ally, the International Republican Institute or IRI. It is particularly ironic, that, according to their website, in 2016 IRI has “launched a new program aimed at countering the increasing threat of Russian soft power and propaganda”, since the narratives pushed by media organisations considered close to Orbán often share Russian disinformation narratives.
In a consultancy firm active in Hungary, Egan is working with a certain Sean Tonner, another US political consultant, who advised Fidesz during the noughties.
Since Fidesz’s landslide electoral victory in 2010, much has been made about Orbán’s connection to Arthur J. Finkelstein, a Republican campaign strategist who made a career working for the Republican side of the US political arena and his right hand man George Birnbaum. Less people now that they are but the last in a long line of political advisors originating from around the Republicans.
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Another interesting fact formerly gone unreported is that Egan has been active around politics in Hungary since the noughties. In 2005, Egan gave an interview to Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet, where he was identified a former Iraqi country director later promoted to the Central and Eastern European directorship of IRI and dubbed a “democracy maker”.
“Egan is one of those American young men, who use their determination and careers in service of an American effort to spread Western-style democracy all over the globe, be it the Eastern Europe of the nineties or the Middle East at the outset of the new millennium” — wrote Magyar Nemzet, which was back then as well as now a close ally of Fidesz.
It is worthy of note that around media friendly with Fidesz, the practice of “democracy making” has not been often praised like this. For example, in the same year, 2005, a feature in Orbán-friendly weekly Magyar Demokrata wrote at length about the so-called colour revolutions very much along the lines of regular Russian narratives, which suspected the United States and in particular IRI behind these.*
The man who helped Orban and Netanyahu rise to power
*They were, including George Soros:
NGOs, “Unions”, & Media Outlets in the Service of Imperialism
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 