Glenn Beck and the limits of Soros-bashing

Glenn Beck took aim at George Soros over three days last week, but so far — at least within the Jewish community — the barrage appears to be backfiring.

As JTA’s Ron Kampeas reported last week, several Jewish organizational leaders are taking issue with Beck’s comments on Soros’ childhood activities during the Holocaust:

Jewish leaders are expressing outrage that Fox News Channel provocateur Glenn Beck has revived an unfounded claim that billionaire businessman and philanthropist George Soros as a child in Nazi-collaborating Hungary helped ship Jews to death camps.

Beck is running a series this week on his radio and TV shows portraying Soros as attempting to control the U.S. economy, and on Wednesday he attacked Soros’ childhood during World War II.

"And George Soros used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off," Beck said. "And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening.

"Here’s a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps. And I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he’s 14 years old. He was surviving. So I’m not making a judgment. That’s between him and God. As a 14-year-old boy, I don’t know what you would do."
In fact Soros, then 13 and living under the protection of a non-Jewish Hungarian, on one occasion joined the older man when he was ordered by Nazis to inventory the estate of a Hungarian Jew who had fled.

On another occasion, the local Jewish council had ordered Soros to deliver letters to local lawyers. Soros’ father, Tivadar, realized the letters were to Jewish lawyers and meant to expedite their deportation. He told his son to warn the targets to flee and ended the boy’s work with the council.

Plenty of liberals pounced on Beck immediately. But so did Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and Elan Steinberg, the vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors.

Beck fired back at Foxman, claiming that the ADL leader had unfairly accused him of anti-Semitism.

But as far as we can tell, Foxman did no such thing. In the ADL’s Nov. 11 statement, Foxman called Beck’s comments "completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top." No mention of the A-word.

Same goes for his actual quotes to JTA:

"This is the height of ignorance or insensitivity, or both," said Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, who noted that as a child, he was protected by non-Jews who had not revealed his background to him.

"As a kid, at 6, I spit at Jews — does that make me part of the Nazi machine?" Foxman said. "There’s an arrogance here for Glenn Beck, a non-Jew, to set the standards of what makes a good Jew."

We’ll be tracking this story and reaching out to Beck’s people for a story that’s in the works.

But in the clearest sign that Beck may have overreached within Jewish circles, Jonathan Tobin of Commentary also took to the blogosphere to slam Beck’s campaign against Soros.

Tobin and Commentary are generally in the camp of those ripping Soros over his harsh criticisms of U.S. and Israeli policies in the Middle East. Yet, Tobin wrote last week, even Soros-bashing has its limits:

… Even George Soros does not deserve some of the opprobrium heaped upon him by Glenn Beck this week. Beck has devoted much of his TV and radio programs in the past few days to detailing Soros’s sins. But instead of sticking to the issues and rightly flaying him for the stands he has taken and the bad causes he supports, Beck painted him as a teenage Nazi collaborator on his Nov. 10 show. …

Beck has become a radio and television phenomenon whose ability to tap into people’s fears and suspicions about media and political elites has made him a star. But as the Nov. 10 broadcast in question shows, his willingness to wade into subjects about which he knows little makes him appear both silly and ill-intentioned. When discussing Soros’s father’s belief in Esperanto, a pre-World War II movement that sought to create a worldwide language and universal government (which Beck incorrectly called “Esperanza”), he made it sound like this bunch of ineffectual do-gooder pacifists was a coequal threat to freedom with Communism and the Nazis. Their idea was foolish, but to treat them as if they belonged to an international conspiracy reflects a lack of context and knowledge about the era.

Similarly, when Beck played a recording of Soros speaking of his efforts to undermine various governments, his listeners had to assume that it was part of some leftist conspiracy that he was funding. Beck left out the fact that what Soros was talking about was his Cold War-era funding of movements that sought to support anti-Communist dissidents in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union. In other words, while Soros’s current politics is abhorrent, he was one of the good guys when it came to the fight against Soviet Communism.

Political commentary that reduces every person and every thing to pure black and white may be entertaining, but it is often misleading. There is much to criticize about George Soros’s career, and his current political activities are troubling. But Beck’s denunciation of him is marred by ignorance and offensive innuendo. Instead of providing sharp insight into a shady character, all Beck has done is further muddy the waters and undermine his own credibility as a commentator.