George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, is a Holocaust survivor. So why are there so many Jews joining in on the anti-Semitic smears leveled against him. Conservatives loathe Soros because he has a liberal political agenda.
The Jewish Telegraph Agency has compiled a list of attacks made against the 90 year old Soros by various Jews.
So many people simply regurgitate whatever they hear on talk radio or the news channels. One such smear of Soros is the accusation that he was a collaborator who served in the Hitler Youth during World War II. So many Jews repeat this horrible libel.
The fact is Soros, who was born in Hungary, survived the war by living with a Christian Hungarian family. He was forced to hide his religion and Hungarian law required him to join its fascist youth organization. And for the record, he was just a teenager at the time.
On 60 minutes Soros admitted he helped Nazis find Jews and said he didn’t feel guilt about it. https://t.co/ii1b5UtpvZ
— Morton Klein (@MortonAKlein7) July 28, 2020
Many people fail to see how such attacks on Soros are anti-Semitic. OK so just because you criticize a prominent Jewish businessman or entertainer it does not make you ant-Semitic. But your criticism should be held strictly to their actions, or words. Calling a Holocaust survivor a Nazi collaborator is no different than comparing Israeli soldiers to Nazis or Zionism to Nazism.
Rabbi Pesach Lerner, President of the Orthodox The Coalition for Jewish Values, once defended attacks on George Soros saying, “Yes, Soros is part of the Jewish nation, but ideologically he is not merely distant but openly hostile towards Israel and Jewish interests. It is ridiculous to link an accurate critique of the use of Soros’ wealth to influence certain public officials to hateful, anti-Semitic lies about Jewish communal control over government at large.”
Lerner told JTA, “He is not part of the global Jewish community, other than being Jewish by birth. One must be aware and sensitive to anti-Semitic tropes in terms of how to express the criticism. But the damage done by Soros is so great that silence is by far the greater danger — and valid criticism can rebut the notion that he in any way represents ‘the Jews.’”
What? Who is this guy to say who gets to be included in the “global Jewish community?”
“Anti-Semitism works by inversion. It works by lying. It works by conflating,” said Ruth Wisse, an emeritus professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard University and conservative writer. “And it’s so difficult to pull some of the threads apart. This is one of the most difficult situations one can be in: when you have a Jewish anti-Jew who is attacked by anti-Semites.”
Even Binyamin Netanyahu’’s son Yair has gotten in on the act. He once tweeted, “Soros is the number 1 anti Israeli and anti Jewish world actor.”
So what is the bottom line here?
Political conservatives don’t like George Soros because he supports liberal causes like ANTIFA. But he is also working hard to restore democracy to his native Hungary. Israel supporters decry him for being pro-Palestinian. But Soros does not seem to have any potions on the conflict that are more extreme than half of all Israelis.
It must be remembered that Jews have always been slandered as being behind Communism and other fanatical political movements. President Richard Nixon consistently blamed Jews for all the turmoil in America during his Presidency.
Today members of the Jewish community should be strong enough to defend any of its members from such attacks, no matter what they might think of that person’s political opinions. A false accusation is always a false accusation and when it accuses a Jews of Nazi collaboration it is the height of anti-Semitism.
