She felt she had to defend herself
Petra Laszlo says she’s not as bad as all that, despite that thing about kicking the young girl and the other thing about tripping a man who was carrying a child, whom he fell on when Laszlo tripped him.
Petra Laszlo said in a letter to the Magyar Nemzet newspaper (in Hungarian) that “something snapped” in her as migrants broke through a police cordon.
She said that she reacted out of panic and felt she had to “defend herself”.
Prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into the incident.
Ms Laszlo said: “I do not deserve the political witch-hunts against me, nor the smears or the death threats.”
Nobody deserves smears or death threats. But people don’t deserve to be kicked or tripped while fleeing for their lives, either.
She was sacked by Hungary’s N1TV station, which is affiliated to the far-right Jobbik party.
The station said in a statement that she had shown “unacceptable behaviour”.
That seems accurate.
“Witch hunts.” Huh.
Luckily I’m not on the jury, so I don’t need to be impartial or anything. What I saw in the video was not self-defense. The people were running around her, not toward her. She moved so has to place herself in their path, and then attacked. The man she tripped fell on a small child; the two people she kicked, she kicked in the knee (or thereabouts), which is a vicious attack. Had she kicked harder, it could have been permanently crippling.
The “self-defense” we’re talking about here is not rational fear of imminent harm, but the distress of the privileged.
Oh, so she was ‘privileged’ was she? Being cis-Magyar and all that goes with it.