Fox News Antisemitism Shows in its Smear of George Soros
The chief executive of a leading Jewish policy organization is condemning Fox News president Roger Ailes for reportedly urging his hosts to push the false claim that Jewish philanthropist George Soros aided the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Alan van Capelle, CEO of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice, criticized Ailes following a report today that Ailes had emailed Fox host Bill O'Reilly suggesting he promote the false claim about Soros. Van Cappelle said that those emails indicate "the hate at Fox starts at the top."
According to a story on Gawker, which obtained the emails:
On November 1, 2010, Ailes sent an email to Bill O'Reilly and his producer David Tabacoff. It contained a partial transcript from a 12-year-old 60 Minutes profile of George Soros in which Soros, a Jew, acknowledged that he posed as a Christian under the Nazi regime and helped confiscate property from other Jews being shipped off to death camps.
The emails indicate Ailes received the transcript from Mitchell Kweit, Fox's vice president for news research and strategic information, in an email titled "Soros No Nazi Guilt," and forwarded it to O'Reilly and Tabacoff with the note, "FYI. This guy has no conscience."
In reality, as a fourteen-year-old boy in occupied Hungary, Soros was hidden from the Nazis by a Christian family. The man hiding Soros was assigned to go inventory the estate of a wealthy Jewish family and brought Soros along to protect him. Soros himself was never part of any property confiscation.
O'Reilly's producer Tabacoff replied to Ailes with a single word: "ugly." Ailes responded by asking, "Do you think you guys will use it or should I give it to someone else?"
That someone else was likely Glenn Beck. The following evening during the 5 p.m. hour of his show, Beck promoted a special about Soros. Beck referred to the billionaire philanthropist as a "puppet master" and questioned his Jewish identity. Earlier that day on his radio show, Beck said Soros "saw people into gas chambers."
Beck's "special," which was broadcast a week later, included the information Ailes forwarded to O'Reilly. Beck claimed Soros "had to help the government confiscate the lands of his fellow Jewish friends and neighbors." On his radio show Beck went even further, saying that Soros helped "send the Jews" to "death camps." His comments were widely condemned by Jewish leaders.
"It's obvious that Glenn Beck could not have carried on his insane tirades against George Soros without the support of Roger Ailes, so these emails really just confirm what common sense tell us - the hate at Fox News starts at the top," van Capelle told Media Matters in a statement Thursday.
"George Soros lost family members in the Holocaust. As a 13 year old boy he survived because his father arranged for him to be hidden with a non-Jewish family willing to take an enormous risk to do the right thing. Six decades later Roger Ailes and Glenn Beck exploited these circumstances to call Soros a Nazi-collaborator. It's a characterization that speaks volumes about Ailes and Beck, and says nothing at all about George Soros."
Bend the Arc was formed in April 2012 from the merger of Jewish Funds for Justice and the Progressive Jewish Alliance.
No wonder conservative pundits and bloggers regularly treat President Obama suggestion that we have a more civil discourse with contempt. Where would conservatism be without its smears, daily lies, conspiracy theories, frequent racism and antisemitism. Conservatism cannot have a moral agenda because than they would have to hold themselves up to actual standards of moral behavior. That should be the clue that like every radical movement in history conservatism is a twisted dangerous set of weird beliefs.
Independent and Principled? Behind the Cato Myth
But in order for progressives and others to make an honest and practical assessment about the Cato Institute and its battle with the Kochs, we need to first set the record straight about some of the claims being spun.
Cato Claim #1: The Cato Institute was one of the earliest and most principled critics of the Bush Administration’s wars abroad and attacks on civil liberties at home (here [4] and here [5]).
Fact: The Cato Institute’s actual record during the Bush Administration years was anything but principled and far from heroic.
John Yoo, author of the notorious “torture memo,” [6] served on the Cato Editorial Board [7] for Cato Supreme Court Review during the Bush presidency. At the same time, Yoo was writing the Bush administration’s legal justifications for waterboarding, Guantanamo, warrantless wiretapping and more. Yoo also contributed articles [8] to Cato Supreme Court Review and a chapter to a Cato book titled The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton [9] criticizing President Clinton’s “imperial presidency.” [10]
The “Cato Policy Report” attacked progressive critics of Bush’s War on Terror as "Terrorism's Fellow Travelers [11]" in its November/December 2001 issue. Former Vice President of Research Brink Lindsey wrote, “Most of the America haters flushed out by September 11 are huddled on the left wing of the conventional political spectrum.”
Libertarianism is another strange and twisted series of beliefs. Once you can a closer look, they are much like the old saying that libertarians are just conservative right-wing zealots who watch too much porn and smoke too much pot.
