Hawzah News Agency-“We Hungarians are normally kind, friendly people. I don’t know what is happening to us, but something is really not right now,” said the 33-year-old financial services employee. “People say things all the time,” the mother-of-one said in a phone interview. “Once I was knocked off a bicycle by a driver who said ‘Why don’t you back to the desert!’”

“We feel the hate. On the tram, ticket controllers hassle me all the time because I wear the scarf, if I go to a restaurant people stare at me,” the 30-year-old said. Their experiences are not shared by all Muslims in Hungary, but groups representing the 40,000-strong minority community say discrimination and race hate are on the rise.

The referendum is about whether Hungary will accept one of the European Union’s main responses to the continent’s migrant crisis, that of sharing refugees around the bloc via mandatory quotas. Prime Minister Viktor Orban is backing a “No” vote and is almost certain to win, inflaming tensions with his western European partners which have heavily criticized his hardline anti-migrant nationalism.

Ignoring this, his government has plastered lampposts and billboards nationwide with posters linking immigration — which Orban calls “poison” — with terrorism and crime. Zoltan Bolek, another convert and head of Hungary’s oldest Muslim group, the Hungarian Islamic Community set up in 1990, said this has further soured the ugly atmosphere.

End.