BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Slovak far-right leader Ján Slota has threatened to flatten Budapest in a tank assault if Hungarian language and culture are allowed to make inroads in Slovak national life. Slota‘s comments, which he made at a rally on Friday night, were taped by local journalists and were aired on private radio stations in Bratislava later. Slovakia, which has a long southern border with Hungary and a 500,000 strong ethnic Hungarian minority, was ruled from Budapest under the Austro-Hungarian empire until the end of World War One. The Slovak National Party leader is no stranger to controversy. Apart from a near fanatical dislike of all things Hungarian, he has also launched several vitriolic attacks on the country‘s gypsy minority. He also opposes NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia and has called on Russia to protect the Serbs in the name of Slavic brotherhood. Anti-Hungarian sentiment among the national party, which increased its share of the vote to around nine percent at general elections in September, has been growing since an ethnic Hungarian party became part of the reformist and pro-Western government which emerged from last year‘s polls. One of the new government‘s firmest pledges has been to end discrimination against the ethnic Hungarians and especially to allow for greater use of the Hungarian language in schools. "My grandfather…was beaten in school in 1912 because he could not say the Lord‘s Prayer in Hungarian… Is this what we, the Slovaks, want to come back? To allow them to hang us from the lamp posts?" Slota told a rally in northern Slovakia. "To learn in Hungarian? No, no way. We will get in our tanks and we will flatten Budapest," he added. Despite professions of panslavism, however, he has little affection for Slovakia‘s one time federation partner, the Czech Republic. Referring to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright‘s Czech origins, Slota said: "Some Czech comes along, who says she is American, and who even says she is foreign minister, some Albright, and she starts to lecture all the Slavs on what morons we are. But we‘re not."