T. Belman. As expected, the NYT is sympathetic to Soros
By Kenneth P. Vogel, Scott Shane and Patrick Kingsley, NYT
WASHINGTON — Hours after he was informed last week that an explosive device had been delivered to his suburban New York home, George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor, got on a call with colleagues to discuss yet another threat: the authoritarian Hungarian government’s crackdown on a university he had founded.
The attempted attack in New York — subsequently determined to have been part of a wave of pipe bombs targeting prominent critics of President Trump — did not come up. But it was no coincidence that Mr. Soros would be facing intense opposition and threats at the same moment in two countries thousands of miles apart.
On both sides of the Atlantic, a loose network of activists and political figures on the right have spent years seeking to cast Mr. Soros not just as a well-heeled political opponent but also as the personification of all they detest. Employing barely coded anti-Semitism, they have built a warped portrayal of him as the mastermind of a “globalist” movement, a left-wing radical who would undermine the established order and a proponent of diluting the white, Christian nature of their societies through immigration.
In the process, they have pushed their version of Mr. Soros, 88, from the dark corners of the internet and talk radio to the very center of the political debate.
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“Soros is vilified because he is effective,” said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former campaign strategist and White House adviser, who is now trying to promote a coordinated nationalist movement across Europe and in the United States that explicitly aspires to mirror and counteract the influence Mr. Soros has built on the left.
“I only hope one day I’m as effective as he has been — and as vilified,” Mr. Bannon said, calling threats like the pipe bomb “the admission ticket for playing in this arena.”
Making the U.S. elections less foreign.
On Fox News, in Republican fund-raising appeals and in research by conservative advocacy groups, his name is invoked as an all-purpose symbol of liberalism run amok.
Mr. Trump references him in Twitter posts and speeches as a donor to anti-Trump protesters, and the president’s family and closest advisers sometimes go much further. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a claim this year by the comedian Roseanne Barr that Mr. Soros is a Nazi. And the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, retweeted a comment saying that Mr. Soros is the Antichrist whose assets should be frozen.
In at least one case, the attacks made their way into United States government-funded media. The Spanish-language Radio Television Marti network, which broadcasts pro-United States content in Cuba, aired a report in May that is now the subject of a government investigation. The report called Mr. Soros a “multimillionaire Jew” of “flexible morals,” who was “the architect of the financial collapse of 2008.”
In the final days of the midterm election race, in which he is spending heavily to elect Democrats, Mr. Soros is being heatedly, if implausibly, cast as the financier of the immigrant caravan, a deep-state presence in the federal bureaucracy and the hidden hand behind the protests against Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.
In Europe, the effort to demonize him has been both fueled and harnessed by nationalist leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and politicians in formerly communist countries like Macedonia, Albania and Russia.
“He’s a banker, he’s Jewish, he gives to Democrats — he’s sort of a perfect storm for vilification by the right, here and in Europe,” said Michael H. Posner, a human rights lawyer and former State Department official in the Obama administration.
Mr. Soros has given his main group, the Open Society Foundations, $32 billion for what it calls democracy-building efforts in the United States and around the world. In addition, in the United States, Mr. Soros has personally contributed more than $75 million over the years to federal candidates and committees, according to Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service records.hat qualifies him as one of the top disclosed donors to American political campaigns in the modern campaign finance era, and it does not include the many millions more he has donated to political nonprofit groups that do not disclose their donors.
By contrast, the network of conservative donors led by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, who have been similarly attacked by some on the American left, has spent about $2 billion over the past decade on political and public policy advocacy..
A Rising Profile
Mr. Soros initially focused his activism on nurturing the democracies that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But as he has evolved in the United States into a more traditional political operator, conservatives have become increasingly driven to discredit him — and, in turn, to use him to discredit the candidates and causes he supports — sometimes by exaggerating or mischaracterizing his role in actions taken by groups he helps to fund, and sometimes with imagery widely seen as anti-Semitic.
The closing advertisement for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign featured Mr. Soros — as well as Janet L. Yellen, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve at the time, and Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, both of whom are Jewish — as examples of “global special interests” who enriched themselves on the backs of working Americans.
If anything, Mr. Soros has been elevated by Mr. Trump and his allies to even greater prominence in the narrative they have constructed for the closing weeks of the 2018 midterm elections. They have projected on to him key roles in both the threat they say is posed by the Central Americans making their way toward the United States border and what they characterized as Democratic “mobs” protesting the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
The National Republican Congressional Committee ran an ad in October in Minnesota suggesting that Mr. Soros, who is depicted sitting behind a pile of cash, “bankrolls” everything from “prima donna athletes protesting our anthem” to “left-wing mobs paid to riot in the streets.” The ad links Mr. Soros to a local congressional candidate who worked at a think tank that has received funding from the Open Society Foundations.
Even after the authorities arrested a fervent Trump supporter and accused him of sending the pipe bombs to Mr. Soros and other critics, Republicans did not back away. The president grinned on Friday when supporters at the White House responded to his attacks on Democrats and “globalists” by chanting, “Lock ’em up,” and yelling, “George Soros.”
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Mr. Soros’s attackers in the United States and in Europe have increasingly found common cause in recent years.
The conservative legal organization Judicial Watch, which has received funding from major conservative donors, this year began an effort to expose United States government assistance for what the group considers Mr. Soros’s “far-left agenda” in South America and Eastern Europe.
The group’s research director, Chris Farrell, referred last week to the “Soros-occupied State Department” on Lou Dobbs’s television program on Fox Business. Fox Business later condemned the remark and banned Mr. Farrell from further appearances. But criticisms of Mr. Soros have been amplified on both Fox Business and Fox News.
Judicial Watch’s efforts pick up a theme pushed by Republican members of Congress in letters to the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development this year accusing Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations of using taxpayer funding to push a liberal agenda in Albania, Colombia, Macedonia and Romania. A spokeswoman for the Soros group said the programs in question focus on issues that are consistent with “American ideals,” like fighting corruption and promoting the rule of law.
The conservative party in Albania is represented in Washington by a lobbyist who is close to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who signed one such letter, while Mr. Orban’s government has made payments to lobbyists and think tanks with connections to Mr. Trump’s team.
Anti-Semitic Attacks
Mr. Soros was born into a Jewish family in Hungary, and survived the Nazi occupation as a child in part by posing as the Christian godson of a government official.
After World War II, Mr. Soros fled Hungary for England as the Soviet Union consolidated control in his home country. He worked as a waiter and a railroad porter and studied at the London School of Economics, where he was deeply influenced by the theories of an Austrian philosopher who taught there, Karl Popper. Mr. Popper wrote about the consequences of what he called “closed” and “open” societies — concepts that shaped Mr. Soros’s investment strategy and philanthropy for decades.
His daring investments in companies and currencies proved hugely lucrative, prompting The Economist to call him “surely the world’s most intriguing investor” in 1987. His decision to short the British pound in 1992 earned his funds a reported profit of $1 billion.
By then, he was turning his attention to democracy-building in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Soros and his foundations supported groups and individuals seeking to bring down Communism, including the Solidarity and Charter 77 movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The leaders of both groups would later lead their countries in the post-Communist era.
In Hungary, Mr. Soros distributed photocopiers to universities and libraries as a means to fight government censorship, and he paid for dissidents to study in the West. The recipients included a young Mr. Orban, then a liberal activist.
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After the end of the Cold War, with the Open Society Foundations as his main vehicle, Mr. Soros funded new work for destitute Soviet scientists in Russia, paid for free school breakfasts for Hungarian children and set up a college, the Central European University, that later drew the ire of Mr. Orban’s government.
In the United States, where Mr. Soros was granted citizenship in the 1960s, Mr. Soros’s efforts often won bipartisan applause. A professed admirer of President Ronald Reagan’s efforts to topple Communist rule in Eastern Europe, Mr. Soros, who at the time described himself as a political independent, was seen by anti-Communist Republicans as a fellow freedom fighter.
As his activities grew more prominent in Europe, and he began funding drug reform efforts in the United States, he started being cast in the 1990s as a central figure in a shadowy Jewish cabal by extremist figures such as the fascist presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and allies of repressive Eastern European leaders who were targeted by groups funded by Mr. Soros.
The theories were initially confined to the anti-Semitic fringe, though Mr. Soros is not closely associated with Jewish or Israeli causes, and in fact has been accused of being anti-Israel and was criticized by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr. Soros first became a major target for Republicans when he donated $27 million in the 2004 election cycle to an effort to defeat President George W. Bush, whose administration Mr. Soros condemned for rushing to war in Iraq and compared to Hitler’s Nazi regime.
J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois, suggested in 2003, when he was House speaker, that the money that Mr. Soros was spending to defeat Mr. Bush “could be drug money.” And in 2010, the talk show host Glenn Beck accused Mr. Soros of “helping send the Jews to the death camps,” devoting three hourlong episodes of his top-rated Fox News show to a series branding Mr. Soros a “puppet master” intent on engineering a coup in the United States. The claims were repudiatedby the Anti-Defamation League.
The efforts by Mr. Soros and a small band of wealthy donors to defeat Mr. Bush in 2004, while unsuccessful, later led to the creation of a network of major liberal donors that reshaped the American political left, marked Mr. Soros as a leading figure in Democratic politics and reinforced his status as a perennial election-time foil for the right.
“Back then, it was a handful of crackpots; it was considered fringe; and it was contained,” said David Brock, the self-described right-wing hit man who switched sides and started a fleet of liberal groups to track conservative disinformation, including from hosts like Mr. Beck.
“But it started coming back with a vengeance during the 2016 campaign,” said Mr. Brock, whose groups have received millions of dollars from Mr. Soros.
During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Soros had expressed even greater alarm about Mr. Trump than he had about Mr. Bush, and he donated more than $16 million to groups supporting Hillary Clinton.
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Mr. Soros, his allies say, interprets the attacks from Mr. Trump, Mr. Orban and their supporters as an effort to intimidate him into backing down. But the intimidation has backfired, they say.
When friends reached out to express concern for his safety after the pipe bomb news broke, Mr. Soros, who was not there when the package was delivered, changed the subject to what he called “the damage” being done by the Trump administration, said his political adviser, Michael Vachon.
Mr. Vachon said that Mr. Soros in recent days has drawn a connection from the president’s rhetorical attacks on his critics to the pipe bombs and even to the killing of 11 people on Saturday at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
In an email to The New York Times, Mr. Soros said he was grieving for the victims of the Pittsburgh shooting and their families. He added: “I came to this country to find refuge. I am deeply distressed that in America in 2018 Jews are being massacred just because they are Jewish.”
A Big 2018 Role
Mr. Soros has donated more than $15 million in this election cycle to support Democratic candidates at the federal level, according to election commission records, and he has also donated to nonprofits that do not disclose their donors.
Mr. Soros’s representatives say he gave $1 million to one such group, the Democracy Integrity Project, which was established after the 2016 election to investigate foreign interference in elections and to research Mr. Trump’s connections to Russian interests. Mr. Soros is considering additional donations to the group, which has paid for research from Fusion GPS, the firm behind the controversial dossier containing salacious claims about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.
The very scale of his activities has given Republicans an opening to portray him as a nefarious driving force behind divisive political conflicts.
After two protesters confronted Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, inside an elevator on Capitol Hill in late September and urged him to vote against Mr. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Mr. Trump dismissed the protesters as Soros pawns.
“The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Don’t fall for it! Also, look at all of the professionally made identical signs. Paid for by Soros and others. These are not signs made in the basement from love! #Troublemakers.”
One of the women did, in fact, work for a group called the Center for Popular Democracy, which has received significant funding from the Open Society Foundations. But the group said that neither it nor Mr. Soros had paid people to protest.
At the same time, his network of European nonprofit groups was increasingly making him a target of authoritarian leaders, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Orban in Hungary.
Mr. Soros’s foundations have been banned from distributing funds in Russia, while Open Society chose to move its offices out of Hungary this year after a smear campaign by the Orban government. The Central European University announced last week that it may soon follow.
In a campaign this year, Mr. Orban’s party ran an advertisement that depicted a smiling Mr. Soros, overlaid with the slogan: “Let’s not let George Soros have the last laugh.” Critics argued that the image was meant to remind viewers of the “Laughing Jew,” a common anti-Semitic trope.
Bottom line my friends is George Soros is globalist believing in world order, he has a number of disciples, including Barry Obama. Wants the UN (worthless body – hates both the US & Israel) to rule the world. We need to protect our sovereignty. Keep in mind there is only one state, the Sovereign Jewish Nation of Israel with it’s capital Jerusalem. In the US, we have a Constitution, so screw world order. Right now we see Great Britain fighting to restore their sovereignty. Time to get the hell out of the UN. Sen Barry Goldwater said this years ago, he was right.
What occurs to me is that Soros appears to confirm the worst stereotypes of antisemites–an authentic Jewish ‘international financier” who funds extreme leftist causes with tens of billions of dollars. This is the stereotype of the “international Jew” which was disseminated by Hitler, Henry Ford, and their ilk. Soros is the only Jew in history, as far as I know, whose behavior appears to confirm this false stereotype. But that makes him all the more guilty for providing antisemites with “evidence,” through his outrageous behavior, that reinforces their lies,, and makes them seem plausible to ordinary people who may not have been confirmed antisemites before. One Jewish international financier doesn’t prove any connection between Jewish “international financiers” and extreme leftist totalitarians. Nearly every other Jewish billionaire in the world (of course there are not very many of them, a few hundred at most) , have moderate and responsible views, and do not fund radical extremists. But this fact does nothing to absolve Soros for providing antisemites with ammunition ( probably literally as well as figuratively).
Soros and his father survived World War II by collaborating with the Hungarian fascists and helping them to loot the property of their fellow Jews. Soros has been a collaborator with his people ‘s enemies ever since. The “lessons” people learn in theeir youth that enable them survive, even by harming innocent people, may stay with them for life and influence their later behavior.
@ Edgar G.:
The brave. brave mouse taking all the blame on his own shoulders…….Like the mythical Jesus.
@ Michael S:
Meshuggana…!! You have the most colossal gall of anyone I have seen on this site.
You have the obsessive CHUTZPAH of referring to our Greatest Tragedy.. unparalleled in History,…as “The Holocaust was a Jewish national humiliation”…. Are you really so dense and insensitive, beyond any limit….?
Of nearly 100 family members in Latvia and Lithuania, none survived, and nearly all on this site were tragically bereft.
You don’t deserve an answer, and this will be the very last one-from me. I do not want to have you address me again, in any way either directly or by implication. You are an offence to me. And that others should answer your deliberately demeaning pseudo Messianic rubbish is their choice..
Ezekiel is offended that you deserted him for Zechariah….. he even stopped producing bones from the earth. So run along and jangle your own…Just shake your head and you’ll hear them.
@ Bear Klein</a@ Michael S:
Weell;;;…If it isn’t the little “brave brave mouse”..persona making it’s always hovering appearance. The brave little man taking all the blame on his shoulders…. Congratulations. …. Now you can go back and play with your dry bones and 7 horned pets.
@ Michael S:
In opening these comments, I first came on “Sorry Edgar you own Soros. He is your brother not mine”… etc and KNEW INSTINCTIVELY that it was “Mashugga Michael”…. who is perversely determined to insert the Soros Disease into the heart of the Jewish People. I don’t know why, except that it must have something to do with his obsessive nature. As well he is deeply offending nearly every Jew on this site although, being Jews they won’t say so-except obliquely..
Perhaps t’s part of the “Animal Farm Syndrome’…”Christians are GOOD–Jews are EVIL…” which latter s exactly what Soros is……evil.
Mashugga Michael is showing how easy it is to be a holtzhaker. (substituted for my original choice..a 4 letter epithet beginning with “P” and ending with “Z”..)
@ Bear Klein:
Cutting to the chase, Bear, “Where’s the beef”? What’s the bottom line? That Soros is the Bogeyman? Okay, if that helps you sleep at night, fine!
Quotes from a good article about Soros from Jonathan Tobin a bright thinker and conservative American Jewish writer are found below:
https://www.jns.org/opinion/looking-for-anti-semitism-in-all-the-wrong-places-2/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-george-soros-became-the-target-of-both-anti-semites-and-right-wing-jews/
@ Bear Klein:
Hello, Bear
Since I am the one who mentioned Peres, I assume I am the “one commentator here” that you refer to, against whom you seem to have heaped every vilification you can think of. You get a free pass on this, seeing that this is Election Week. I hope you will calm down in a few days. Concerning Peres,
“Support for Peres evaporated when successive bomb attacks killed dozens in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and talks with Syria came to naught. Likud warned: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” Arab states feared that his dream of a BORDERLESS Middle East spelled Israeli economic colonialism by stealth…”
— https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/28/shimon-peres-obituary
Peres was a globalist. The fact that he was someone you knew, does not negate that fact. The fact that he was Jewish, and the President of Israel, means no more than the fact that Obama was Christian, and the President of the US. If you drop the mud-slinging labels, it makes it a lot easier to see these things clearly.
One commentator here even compared Shimon Peres to Soros claiming that Peres was also globalist who did not believe in national borders.
This is in my view a clear anti-Semitic type statement coming from an ignorant Jew hater based on anti-semitic Christian doctrine (which is were a lot hatred of Jews comes from). Peres (who I knew) and did not like for what some call phase Two of his life when he completely flipped the good work he did for the Jewish State in the first part of his life.
We always have to remember that some religious Christians can never accept the fact the Jews do not accept their beliefs and hate us all for it.
@ Bear Klein:
Bear,
Thank you for saying the truth that others seem unable to spit out:
George Soros IS Jewish.
I’ll take all the rest with a grain of salt. This seems to be the season, for everyone to label everyone else with some slimy label. I’m sick of it, and will be glad when the election results are finalized.
One thing is clear about pseudo intellectuals Jew Haters whether on the far right or far left is that they try and cover up their hatred of Jews with phony intellectual arguments. They are always exposed when the light shines on them.
Edgar G. Said:
Soros was born a Jew but left its people and became traitor to the Jewish people.
What is a consistent pattern is that antisemites love to loudly proclaim him a Jew. Perhaps it is a way to attack Jews without making it clear that they are actual antisemites. Sort of like the left says we are not antisemites but only against Zionism. A very thinly disguised veil but when one peaks below the veil, one finds a full blown Jew hater.
@ Edgar G.:
Agreed. Soros is a vile Nazi posing as a Jew while sponsoring anti Israel attacks. He is trying to turn the US into another Venezuela or Cuba while enriching himself further. This write up praises this evil character instead of exposing his financing the violence against Trump supporters.
@ Edgar G.:
Edgar,
I don’t post here, trying to win your approval. As sure as the sun comes up in the morning, if I say the sky is blue, you’ll say it’s grey; and if I say it’s grey, you’ll say it’s blue.
George Soros is Jewish, by the Jews’ own definition: both his parents were Jewish, end of story.
Soros is an embarrassment to Jews. For one thing, he really is a Holocaust survivor. When the Holocaust began, at Kristallnacht, Jewish rabbis around the world didn’t stand up like Patrick Henry, say, “Give me liberty or give me death!”, then take off their taliths to reveal some sort of Resistance Army uniform. They let themselves be herded like sheep; and some of them, along the way, lied and sneaked and hid their way until they were rescued. Many of them later were psychotically devastated, by what can only be called an extreme case of “survivor’s syndrome”. Others fought, like US Jews who joined the Army and fought in Europe, fighting someone else’s war against someone else’s enemy.
The Holocaust was a Jewish national humiliation, on a colossal scale. That’s not pretty. Jews don’t like to think about it; and people like Soros continually remind them of it.
Concerning Soros’ Globalist “politics” (actually his life’s ambition): He is the archetype of a do-gooder Jew, trying to bring about a Messianic Age without a Messiah. Here’s his “World without borders” (which I believe Shimon Peres also envisioned):
Zech.2
[4] And said unto him, Run, speak to this young man, saying, Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns without walls for the multitude of men and cattle therein:
[5] For I, saith the LORD, will be unto her a wall of fire round about, and will be the glory in the midst of her…
…only Soros and Peres don’t believe Yahweh will be a fire round about the Jewish people, protecting them. Their Jerusalem won’t need walls, because there won’t be any difference between the Jews and the heathen; and Jew and Gentile alike will waltz into utopian glory, hand in hand, to the tune of great visionaries of these “enlightened” Jews.
Sorry, Edgar. You own Soros. He’s your brother, not mine. You deal with him; but he’s still your brother.
@ Michael S:
I thought for a while that you’d………… You didn’t seem to take my post into your mind. The ONLY thing about Soros that s Jewish is the actual blood in his veins….and that he was born into a completely unobservant Jewish family, who practiced nothing of Judaism their whole lives.
Nobody ever regards Soros as a Jew except vicious Anti-Semites. He changed whatever religion he had-which was none- long ago to what he has been ever since..
My comments are about the article… your comment is to show that Soros is 100% Jew…………. and that was about as much as Karl Marx was 100% Jew. There’s no point to it-except a negative one.
So what’s your point….There are no dry jangling bones here……
@ Edgar G.:
Soros is a Globalist Jew, 100% globalist and 100% Jewish.
He is “anti-” a lot of things: Conservatives, Christians, Israel, Brexit, etc.
The height of idiocy, Promoting the idea that Soros is a Jew suffering Anti-Semitism.
The only once Jewish part of Soros is his blood and that is so thin as to be non-existent.
Picturing him as a kindly much maligned generous old man, in this exculpating piece of rubbish, s totally against what he really is –a malign globalist, a highly influential guru,.pouring billions of dollars into leftist causes in efforts to defeat Republicans n the US, and nationalists everywhere.