Czech Republic Quotes

Czech Republics worst pick up line: What's a nice place like this doing around a women like you?

You see, in the Czech Republic, on December fifth, St. Nicholas goes around bringing candy and small gifts to children, accompanied by an angel and a devil. In a holiday tradition that is the stuff of nightmares, the devil threatens to scoop bad children into his sack and carry them to hell. (And you thought coal in your stocking was harsh?)

The Czech Republic. Czechoslovakia hasn't existed for almost twenty years. So unless her parents are visiting 1992, they're in the Czech Republic.

Prague does not have its name for no reason - in truth, Prague is a threshold between the life on Earth and Heaven, a threshold much thinner and narrower then in any other places…

secular countries such as Denmark and the Czech Republic aren’t more violent than devout countries such as Iran and Pakistan.

Pavel Kohout, a Czech author, writing in the heyday of the Czechoslovakian experiment with freedom, defined a “free citizen” as a “Citizen-Co-ruler.

Tomas didn’t hesitate to respond. He’d probably known the answer long before he ever came to America. “It’s not about freedom,” he replied. “America is one of the least-free countries in the Western world. Things are so controlled here compared to Europe.” I had no idea what was coming next. Why would he want to become an American citizen if it wasn’t for the freedom? Perhaps it was simply because his friends were here. “I wanted to become a citizen for the opportunities,” he finally continued. “In the Czech Republic, I had no future. In America, anything is possible. Anyone can become whatever he wants. It’s all happening here. There are a million different paths and choices and careers open to everyone who lives in America. And no matter what happens politically, they can’t take that away.” Everyone at the table fell silent. The truth has a way of doing that to people sometimes.

The four of us got back into the car. In an instant, I distinctly heard a “soundless music”. It was the melody of friendship, the sound of a perfectly tuned quartet who got together by chance, four hearts playing in harmony.

I realize with fright that my impatience for the re-establishment of democracy had something almost communist in it; or, more generally, something rationalist. I had wanted to make history move ahead in the same way that a child pulls on a plant to make it grow more quickly. I believe we must learn to wait as we learn to create. We have to patiently sow the seeds, assiduously water the earth where they are sown and give the plants the time that is their own. One cannot fool a plant any more than one can fool history. —Václav Havel,7 playwright, last President of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic

Together, by 2005, the contiguous parts of the Belarusian and Ukrainian zones made up a total area of more than 4,700 square kilometers of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus, all of it rendered officially uninhabitable by radiation. Beyond the borders of the evacuated land, the contamination of Europe with radionuclides from the explosion had proved widespread and long lasting: for years after the accident, meat, dairy products, and produce raised on farms from Minsk to Aberdeen and from France to Finland were found laced with strontium and cesium and had to be confiscated and destroyed. In Britain, restrictions on the sale of sheep grazed on the hill farms of North Wales would not be lifted until 2012. Subsequent studies found that three decades after the accident, half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of the Czech Republic were still too radioactive for human consumption. At

While glass had been used by the rich to drink wine for hundreds of years, most beers until the nineteenth century were drunk from opaque vessels such as ceramic, pewter, or wooden mugs. Since most people couldn’t see the color of the liquid they were drinking, it presumably didn’t matter much what these beers looked like, only what they tasted like. Mostly, they were dark brown and murky brews. Then in 1840 in Bohemia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic, a method to mass-produce glass was developed, and it became cheap enough to serve beer to everyone in glasses. As a result people could see for the first time what their beer looked like, and they often did not like what they saw: the so-called top-fermented brews were variable not just in their taste, but in their color and clarity too. Not ten years later, a new beer was developed in Pilsen using bottom-fermenting yeast. It was lighter in color, it was clear and golden, it had bubbles like champagne—it was lager.

When I woke up in the morning I was in bad shape. My neck was stiff and I couldn’t turn it. We weren’t pros, so there was no such thing as a physical therapist or masseuse to fix it. The best I could do was just rub in some Bengay and hope for the best. When we got to the Czech Republic a couple of days later, my neck still had zero mobility. In order to look to the side, I had to move my entire body. As if that weren’t enough to worry about, we were competing against Rachael, who was now teamed up with the Russian guy who had beaten me as a junior. His name was Evgeni Smagin, and he wore his dark hair greased back. The guy just looked slick from head to toe. I turned to Aneta. “This is so not good,” I told her. “They are like the ultimate, ultimate couple. They’re going to beat us.” Aneta looked very upset, so I guess something inside me said, “Derek, man up!” My neck was messed up and I was about to get my ass kicked by my archnemesis and my ex. It couldn’t get much worse than that.

The identification we feel towards the places where we live or were born can give us an anchor in a chaotic world and strengthen our connections to family, community, and the generations that preceded and will follow us. At their best, such feelings are a celebration of culture and all that comes with it in the form of literature, language, music, food, folktales, and even the wildlife we associate with our homelands--the eagle in America, for instance, or in the Czech Republic what's left of our lions, wolves, and bears. There is, however, a tipping point, where loyalty to one's own tribe curdles into resentment and hatred, then aggression towards others. That's when Fascism enters the picture, trailed by an assortment of woes, up to and including the Holocaust and global war. Because of that history, postwar statesmen established organizations to make it harder for deluded nationalists to trample on the rights of neighbors. These bodies include the United Nations--hence Truman's speech--and regional institutions in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

My neck was messed up and I was about to get my ass kicked by my archnemesis and my ex. It couldn’t get much worse than that. But we were at the worlds, in this huge arena with everyone cheering. We had made it this far, and I was proud of how hard we worked. “You know, let’s just have an awesome time.” And that was it: I took all this pressure off us. We danced our butts off and I forgot to worry about my neck or Rachael and Evgeni. I was just living in the moment, pulling my energy from the roaring crowd. They were going crazy for their Czech Republic representatives, but I didn’t care. I used their energy to fuel mine. There was such a joy and freedom to my dancing that day. I gave myself permission to just let it all go, and my dancing felt pure and unbridled. We got to the finale--I somehow hung in there--and my neck was so tight and throbbing, I could barely turn it to see where Aneta was. It was kind of like dancing with blinders on; I had tunnel vision. Yet on we danced, till the judges called time. I had made it; we had made it. All I wanted now was a huge ice pack and a nap. They read the names out from sixth place to first. We were standing backstage behind a huge curtain, and Rachael and Evgeni were right next to us. Swell.

In 1906, the year after Einstein’s annus mirabilis, Kurt Gödel was born in the city of Brno (now in the Czech Republic). Kurt was both an inquisitive child—his parents and brother gave him the nickname der Herr Warum, “Mr. Why?”—and a nervous one. At the age of five, he seems to have suffered a mild anxiety neurosis. At eight, he had a terrifying bout of rheumatic fever, which left him with the lifelong conviction that his heart had been fatally damaged. Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians. In the philosophical world of 1920s Vienna, however, it was considered distinctly old-fashioned. Among the many intellectual movements that flourished in the city’s rich café culture, one of the most prominent was the Vienna Circle, a group of thinkers united in their belief that philosophy must be cleansed of metaphysics and made over in the image of science. Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, their reluctant guru, the members of the Vienna Circle regarded mathematics as a game played with symbols, a more intricate version of chess. What made a proposition like “2 + 2 = 4” true, they held, was not that it correctly described some abstract world of numbers but that it could be derived in a logical system according to certain rules.

On September 17, 2009 President Obama announced that he was reversing previous U. S. plans to place American missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. The American missile shield was designed to defend Israel and other nations against Iranian missiles. The cancellation disappointed America’s allies, worried about the re-emerging Russian Bear. It also emboldened Russian leaders and worried Israel.

While glass had been used by the rich to drink wine for hundreds of years, most beers until the nineteenth century were drunk from opaque vessels such as ceramic, pewter or wooden mugs. Since most people couldn’t see the colour of the liquid they were drinking, it presumably didn’t matter much what these beers looked like, only what they tasted like. Mostly, they were dark brown and murky brews. Then in 1840 in Bohemia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic, a method to mass-produce glass was developed, and it became cheap enough to serve beer to everyone in glasses. As a result people could see for the first time what their beer looked like, and they often did not like what they saw: the so-called top-fermented brews were variable not just in their taste, but in their colour and clarity too. Not ten years later, though, a new beer was developed in Pilsen using bottom-fermenting yeast. It was lighter in colour, it was clear and golden, it had bubbles like champagne – it was lager. This was a beer to be drunk with the eyes as much as with the mouth, and these light golden lagers have continued in this tradition ever since, being designed to be served in a glass. How ironic, then, that so much lager is drunk from an opaque metal can, meaning that the only beer uniquely identifiable for its visual appearance is the epitome of opaqueness, a beer in the old pre-glass tradition, Guinness.

According to the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2012 (see the Introduction) Germany is today the only member of the EU in which most people, 59 per cent, think their country has been helped by European integration. Majorities or near majorities in most countries surveyed now believe that the economic integration of Europe has actually weakened their economies. This is the opinion in Greece (70 per cent), France (63 per cent), Britain (61 per cent), Italy (61 per cent), the Czech Republic (59 per cent), and Spain (50 per cent). The survey data also show that the crisis of the euro has triggered a full-blown crisis of public confidence: in the economy, in the future, in the benefits of European economic integration, in membership in the EU, in the euro and in the free-market system. Again, Europeans largely oppose further fiscal austerity to deal with the crisis; they are divided on bailing out indebted nations; and oppose Brussels’ oversight of national budgets. In short, the European project is a major casualty of the ongoing sovereign-debt crisis: we are witnessing the failure of the attempt to integrate Europe through a ‘positive’ law that has neither produced the promised benefits for the people, nor has it been enacted by the people itself.

Eventually the talent supply runs out and you have to look elsewhere for the right team. Fortunately, there are some terrific sources of outstanding product talent in places such as India, Eastern Europe (especially the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), Northern Europe (especially the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany), Israel, China, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.

Prague Czech Republic Haiku The hell with Prague Castle, Czech women are looser than A wizards sleeve.

Honoring figures like Forrest in Memphis while ignoring Wells is like erecting a statue to the Nazi death camp commander Amon Goeth in the Czech Republic town of Svitavy, the birthplace of Oskar Schindler, who rescued 1,200 Jews.

This is summed nicely up by Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic (and one of the very few leaders of any country to doubt the mainstream view of the science of climate change): “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.

A study published in The British Medical Journal examined the beer-drinking habits of a group of people who had suffered heart attacks and the beer-drinking habits of a group randomly selected from the Czech population. The Czech Republic is especially appropriate for such a study, because it is a country where beer is the beverage of choice. Perhaps surprisingly, in both groups the lowest risk of heart attack was found among the men who drank nine to twenty pints a week. Their risk was a third of that seen in the men who never drank beer. But if they drank more, they lost that protection and developed problems. Dark beer seems to be especially protective. Researchers discovered that it even reduces the potential harm caused by the notorious heterocyclic aromatic amines (HAAs) that form when food is heated to a high temperature. Serving dark beer at a barbecue is a good idea. Maybe Benjamin Franklin was on to something when he said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.â€

Where the River Elbe flows through the Czech Republic, summer water levels have recently dropped so far that ‘hunger stones’ have been uncovered – carved boulders used for centuries to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the hunger stones bears the inscription ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: ‘If you see me, weep.

So from morning onward I’m kept company by pictures of weather fronts, lovely abstract lines on maps, blue ones and red ones, relentlessly approaching from the west, from over the Czech Republic and Germany. They carry the air that Prague was breathing a short while ago, maybe Berlin too. It flew in from the Atlantic and crept across the whole of Europe, so one could say we have sea air up here, in the mountains. I particularly love it when they show maps of pressure, which explain a sudden resistance to getting out of bed or an ache in the knees, or something else again—an inexplicable sorrow that has just the same character as an atmospheric front, a moody figura serpentinata within the Earth’s atmosphere.

Travel Bucket List 1. Have a torrid affair with a foreigner. Country: TBD. 2. Stay for a night in Le Grotte della Civita. Matera, Italy. 3. Go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Queensland, Australia. 4. Watch a burlesque show. Paris, France. 5. Toss a coin and make an epic wish at the Trevi Fountain. Rome, Italy. 6. Get a selfie with a guard at Buckingham Palace. London, England. 7. Go horseback riding in the mountains. Banff, Alberta, Canada. 8. Spend a day in the Grand Bazaar. Istanbul, Turkey. 9. Kiss the Blarney Stone. Cork, Ireland. 10. Tour vineyards on a bicycle. Bordeaux, France. 11. Sleep on a beach. Phuket, Thailand. 12. Take a picture of a Laundromat. Country: All. 13. Stare into Medusa’s eyes in the Basilica Cistern. Istanbul, Turkey. 14. Do NOT get eaten by a lion. The Serengeti, Tanzania. 15. Take a train through the Canadian Rockies. British Columbia, Canada. 16. Dress like a Bond Girl and play a round of poker at a casino. Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 17. Make a wish on a floating lantern. Thailand. 18. Cuddle a koala at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Queensland, Australia. 19. Float through the grottos. Capri, Italy. 20. Pose with a stranger in front of the Eiffel Tower. Paris, France. 21. Buy Alex a bracelet. Country: All. 22. Pick sprigs of lavender from a lavender field. Provence, France. 23. Have afternoon tea in the real Downton Abbey. Newberry, England. 24. Spend a day on a nude beach. Athens, Greece. 25. Go to the opera. Prague, Czech Republic. 26. Skinny dip in the Rhine River. Cologne, Germany. 27. Take a selfie with sheep. Cotswolds, England. 28. Take a selfie in the Bone Church. Sedlec, Czech Republic. 29. Have a pint of beer in Dublin’s oldest bar. Dublin, Ireland. 30. Take a picture from the tallest building. Country: All. 31. Climb Mount Fuji. Japan. 32. Listen to an Irish storyteller. Ireland. 33. Hike through the Bohemian Paradise. Czech Republic. 34. Take a selfie with the snow monkeys. Yamanouchi, Japan. 35. Find the penis. Pompeii, Italy. 36. Walk through the war tunnels. Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. 37. Sail around Ha long Bay on a junk boat. Vietnam. 38. Stay overnight in a trulli. Alberobello, Italy. 39. Take a Tai Chi lesson at Hoan Kiem Lake. Hanoi, Vietnam. 40. Zip line over Eagle Canyon. Thunderbay, Ontario, Canada.

The truth is that our market economy is a finely tuned legal and moral system that has evolved over hundreds of years. It is not a natural condition, but an extremely sophisticated institutional construction, one that requires constant monitoring and enforcement. The system of property rights alone requires a massive legal-bureaucratic apparatus just to keep track of who owns what and who owes what to whom. Consumer protection laws, which establish the basic rules designed to ensure that competition remains “healthy,” are also an enormous legal apparatus. (It was estimated, for instance, that after the “velvet revolution,” the Czech Republic needed to pass eighty thousand pages of law in order to get its product standards up to minimum European Union levels.) Furthermore, the number of regulations must increase every time someone finds a more ingenious way of circumventing the old ones (in the same way that the number of rules governing sport increases every time someone finds a new way of cheating).

Czechs simply don’t say they’re going camping or spending time outdoors. They say, in Czech, that they are going “into the nature” as though nature, příroda, is beyond a place in the woods or other forms of terrain, that nature was a state of mind and had the ability to reverse the crippling, chaotic aspects of life.

Before Italy, Beijing had succeeded in persuading several Central and Eastern European nations to join the BRI—Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Hungary—as well as Portugal, Greece and Malta in Southern Europe. Italy’s joining reinforces the impression that Beijing is pursuing a strategy in Europe of ‘use the countryside to surround the city’.

Then there are the pro-Western countries formerly in the Warsaw Pact but now all in NATO and/or the EU: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania and Romania. By no coincidence, many are among the states which suffered most under Soviet tyranny.

For my maternal grandmother, who lives with us for a few months every year, that line came as an incredible relief. For her, it was personal. She and my grandfather grew up in Czechoslovakia during the very worst of communism. Unlike most of these new-age Starbucks-chugging socialists in Brooklyn, they knew the horrors that can come from a state-run economy, and the scars of socialism are seared in her memory. I vividly remember speaking with her during the lead-up to the 2016 election, when she was watching neo-socialists such as Bernie Sanders on CNN almost every day. (We’re working on getting her off the CNN train, by the way. But back in the Czech Republic, you pick up CNN early, like a drug addiction. Soon she’ll be watching Fox with the rest of the sane people in the world.) “Don, don’t these people understand?” she asked, her voice quavering, tears coming to her eyes. This is a woman who hid from Nazis in the basement of her farmhouse as a child and lived under Communist occupation for decades. At ninety-three, she’s still stronger and tougher than most. But she feared that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren might go through some of the same things she went through, and the thought of that had scared the hell out of her. “They don’t know how bad it can be. Please do something. Don’t they know this is all lies?

This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia are 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania are 80 per cent dependent, and Greece, Austria and Hungary 60 per cent. About half of Germany’s gas consumption comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticise the Kremlin for aggressive behaviour than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 per cent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply.

Do what you love, and excel in it.

According to the FBI, Semtex has an indefinite half-life and is far stronger than traditional explosives such as TNT. It is also easily available on the black market. Semtex became infamous when just 12 ounces of the substance, molded inside a Toshiba cassette recorder, blasted Pan Am flight 103 out of the sky above Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, killing 270 people. A year later, after the Czech Communist regime was toppled, the new president, Vaclav Havel, revealed that the Czechs had exported 900 tons of Semtex to Col. Moammar Qaddafi's Libya and another 1,000 tons to other unstable states such as Syria, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. Some experts now put worldwide stockpiles of Semtex at 40,000 tons. Brebera says that with so much Semtex already in the hands of terrorists, and similar explosives being produced in other countries, the Czech Republic can no longer control it. "Semtex is no worse an explosive than any other," he says, defensive at the sight of accusatory headlines in Western newspapers. "The American explosive C4 is just as invisible to airport X-rays, but they don't like to mention that." After the Lockerbie tragedy, Brebera added metal components and a distinct odor to make Semtex easier to detect. But that did not stop terrorists from using it to bomb the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998, or prevent the IRA, which received about 10 tons of Semtex from Libya, from continuing its attacks.

Semtex is the best plastic explosive in the world. It feels like Play-Doh, has no smell, and was designed in 1966 to clear land-mines and improve industrial safety. It is also undetectable by dogs and airport security devices, and after it left Mr. Brebera's laboratory in 1968, Semtex became the favored weapon of international terrorists from Libya to Northern Ireland. Since Sept. 11, the Czech Republic and its new NATO allies have become increasingly nervous about the continued production and sale of Brebera's fatal concoction. Over the past two decades, terrorists have employed Semtex in several deadly attacks, including the 1988 explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. And no one has found a reliable way to combat it. Named after Semtin, the village in East Bohemia where Brebera invented it, this extraordinarily stable compound of RDX (Cyclonite) and PETN (Penaerythrite Tetranitrate) slips through airport security scans as easily as a pair of nylons.

There was an astounding variety to go through. He had seen a fat one addressed to Paris—the envelope sealed with a Christmas tree sticker. A card to the Czech Republic. And one to India. Another of Morley's. A small red envelope going to England. A lot to the United States. A lot more for Canada. Another of Morley's. And a second, in a child's printing, addressed to the North Pole. It was affecting. All of them presumably said the same thing. The one thing that is so hard to say in person, but that everyone says at the bottom of a card: love. Love, me. Love, you. Love, Dave. Love, Stuart.

In more advanced countries, such as the Czech Republic and Estonia, state socialism led to a steadily increasing lag behind neighbouring countries such as Austria and Finland.

In this collection of essays, you will meet more people like Zakia - golden-hearted souls who come from places like Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Canada, Cuba, The Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, and Tanzania. People who become the heroes of our stories because they show the way or deliver joy, care for us when we're vulnerable, help us navigate meaning, or propel us when we're stuck. They are custodians of travel; they keep us believing in its magic.

If Prague and the rest of Bohemia, with all their charming hospodas delightful architecture and pretty landscape should become too cosy for you, Ostrava, the Czech Republic's third largest city with about 330,000 inhabitants, will rapidly cure your spleen. Tucked away in the country's northeastern corner on the border between Moravia, Silesia and Poland, the former Czechoslovakia's "heart of steel" offers the true flair of the Wild East. As an Australian probably would have put it, this is a city where men are men, and sheep are nervous.

Hitler divided humans into three categories based on physical appearance. He declared the Aryan race as biologically and culturally superior to other races. He described Aryans as fair-skinned, blond, and blue-eyed. Jews and the Slavic people of Poland, Russia, and what is the now the Czech Republic formed the most racially inferior group.

An example to humanity. Israel, Germany, Spain, France, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Japan, China, Korea, South Africa, Canada, United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Slovakia, Colombia, Austria, Switzerland, Cyprus, Belarus, Czech Republic, Greece, Turkey, Venezuela, Portugal, Hungary, Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines and New Zealand.

forced to wear armbands identifying them as German, and undergoing the death-by-inches punishment of “German rations” troubled an increasing number of Czechoslovak consciences. The newspaper Nová doba, for example, carried a series of articles in the summer of 1946 devoted to the plight of ethnic Czechs who were “condemned by Czechs and the Czech Republic for taking their German partner at a time when that was no treason.

Obzory argued that so inhumane and short-sighted a policy would leave a legacy of bitterness with which the next generation of Czechoslovaks would have to deal. “It is in the republic’s interest to keep these children within the State and within the nation inasmuch as they are—or at the very least half of them are—Czech children who, once expelled from the land of their birth, will detest it with all their strength for the manner in which their mothers were treated!

Milos Zeman is the President of the Czech Republic. He is pro-Russian, is friends with Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage, endorsed Donald Trump for President, and has ties to Hungary’s Jobbik movement. Zeman has justified the civil war in Ukraine and has denied that Russia has a military presence there. He stated, “I take seriously the statement of foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that there are no Russian troops [in Ukraine].” Zeman had been consistently verbal in his support for the lifting of Western sanctions on Russia and was against EU sanctions on Russia. He was re-elected President in January 2018 with 51.4% of the vote. He won the majority of the rural vote by exhorting a populist anti-immigrant slogan: “Stop Migrants and [opponent] Drahos. This is our land! Vote Zeman!” Zeman’s chief economic advisor is Martin Nejedlÿ, a former executive of the Russian oil company, Lukoil Aviation Czech. Lukoil was once the second largest oil company in Russia following Gazprom. Martin Nejedlÿ of Prague was also owner of Fincentrum, a financial advisory firm with “more than 2,500 financial advisors” on its website with offices in Prague and Bratislava. The firm has a history of alliances with the Kremlin. The Prime Minister of the Republic’s coalition government is 63-year-old Andrej Babiš. He is a media and agribusiness mogul and the second-richest man in the Czech Republic. ANO is the Action of Dissatisfied Citizens Party that was founded by Babiš that holds a center-right populist platform like many European and American conservative right-

Such sentiments demonstrate that the recent rise in anti-Semitism across Europe is not merely a product of the relatively new tensions in the Middle East. Traditional forms of hatred towards Jews are also alive and well. The same could be said for the rise in animosity towards Gypsies since the fall of communism, particularly in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. In Bulgaria riots broke out in the autumn of 2011, after a series of racist demonstrations against Gypsies.5