{"id":44637,"date":"2018-12-19T11:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-12-19T00:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=44637"},"modified":"2018-12-19T10:27:18","modified_gmt":"2018-12-18T23:27:18","slug":"anti-semitism-has-a-new-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/anti-semitism-has-a-new-name\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Semitism has a new name"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Over the centuries, Jews have been blamed for all sorts of ills in Christian and Muslim societies, from the Great Plague of the 14th century to the financial crashes of modern times. In 1903, The protocols of the elders of Zion<\/em>, produced by Imperial Russia\u2019s secret police, \u2018exposed\u2019 a diabolical Jewish plot<\/a> to achieve world domination by promoting liberalism\u2014and became a pretext for anti-Semitism in Europe. These narratives endure to this day, only now they are being projected onto a single Jew: George Soros<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Right-wing, anti-globalist conspiracy theorists\u2014a group that now includes US president Donald Trump\u2014demonise Soros, a wealthy Jew who is deeply committed to liberal causes. The former Fox News host Bill O\u2019Reilly described<\/a> Soros in 2007 as \u2018off-the-chart dangerous\u2019 and \u2018an extremist who wants open borders, a one-world foreign policy, legalised drugs, euthanasia, and on and on.\u2019 For the Texas-based Infowars<\/em> founder Alex Jones, Soros is nothing less than<\/a> \u2018the head of the Jewish mafia\u2019 conspiring to derail Trump\u2019s presidency.<\/p>\n

Such figures imagine the hidden hand of the \u2018leftist billionaire\u2019 almost everywhere. When a caravan of desperate Central American asylum seekers began walking all the way to the United States border before the recent US midterm elections, it was a ploy by Soros<\/a> to win a Democratic majority in Congress. When survivors of February\u2019s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, launched a gun-control campaign, Soros was supposedly bankrolling them<\/a>. And it was Soros who arranged<\/a> for Christine Blasey Ford to testify that Trump\u2019s pick for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, had sexually assaulted her.<\/p>\n

Soros was also supposedly behind the sexual-assault survivors who confronted Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator to demand an investigation<\/a> into the Kavanaugh accusations, just as he orchestrated the Women\u2019s March<\/a>, a worldwide protest held the day after Trump\u2019s inauguration. He was even pulling the strings when the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem to protest police violence against black people.<\/p>\n

But Soros\u2019s imaginary designs are hardly limited to the US, nor are they all recent. He has, his detractors declare<\/a>, single-handedly destabilised governments in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, France and the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n

How did Soros come to be such a larger-than-life villain?<\/p>\n

Soros is what the late historian Isaac Deutscher would call a \u2018non-Jewish Jew<\/a>\u2019\u2014one who sought ideas, inspiration and fulfillment beyond the boundaries of Jewry, and yet continued to belong to the Jewish tradition. That stance often enables the non-Jewish Jew to make important contributions to science, culture and politics.<\/p>\n

This is certainly true of Soros, who is not just an enlightened philanthropist, but also a perceptive intellectual participating in today\u2019s most heated debates. Soros has proposed bold solutions to a wide range of problems, including Brexit<\/a>, eurozone reform<\/a>, migration policy<\/a> and the crisis of global capitalism.<\/p>\n

A disciple of the philosopher Karl Popper, Soros has promoted<\/a> open societies as the ultimate guarantee of freedom from tyranny and religious or ideological indoctrination, and as a powerful weapon against rising social inequality. A globalised community that neutralises the influence of nationalism, he rightly believes, is vital to enable us to confront existential threats like climate change and nuclear conflict.<\/p>\n

So, beyond offering funding for ameliorative programs, Soros uses his philanthropy to advance a vision of a truly free society governed by democratically accountable leaders. For example, his foundations played an integral role in spreading democratic ideals beyond the Iron Curtain, both before and after it fell. It is this dimension of Soros\u2019s work\u2014together with the sheer fact that he is a wealthy Jewish financier\u2014that so infuriates the far right, beginning in the very countries whose democratic transitions he once supported.<\/p>\n

As Eastern Europe\u2019s democracies backslide politically, Soros has made donations to NGOs fighting corruption and authoritarianism. This has prompted Russian president Vladimir Putin to ban the Open Society Foundations from disbursing grants to Russian organisations and artists.<\/p>\n

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n, who once received a scholarship from Soros to study at Oxford, has introduced the so-called Stop Soros law, which prohibits \u2018promoting and supporting illegal migration\u2019. The law\u2019s vague wording means that the government could, in theory, arrest anyone who provides any kind of assistance to undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most pernicious manifestation of this anti-Soros hysteria, however, has occurred in Israel. Against the advice of his own ambassador to Hungary, who denounced Orb\u00e1n\u2019s anti-Semitic attacks on Soros, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s government has blamed Soros<\/a> for \u2018funding organisations that seek to deny Israel the right to defend itself\u2019 and introduced its own \u2018Soros law\u2019 aimed at terminating that funding.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu\u2019s accusation is preposterous. Out of the US$1 billion the Open Society Foundations donate annually worldwide, some US$3 million went to Israeli and Palestinian NGOs. At the top of the list is the Palestinian Al-Quds University, whose rector, Sari Nusseibeh, created a peace plan jointly with Ami Ayalon, a former admiral and head of the Israel Security Agency (more widely known as Shin Bet). Another recipient, B\u2019Tselem, is an Israeli group that monitors human-rights violations in the occupied territories.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Netanyahu allows multimillion-dollar donations for settlement construction by right-wing donors like Sheldon Edelson. In fact, Netanyahu has often allied himself with whichever government or party, including far-right anti-Semites, is willing to support the repression of the occupied Palestinians. So what we are seeing is an Israeli prime minister team up with the ideological descendants of European fascists to attack a Holocaust survivor whose philanthropy fulfills the principle, called tikkun olam<\/em>, that Jews must act in ways that improve or repair the world. Netanyahu\u2019s son Yair went so far as to post<\/a> on his Facebook page a revolting anti-Semitic cartoon targeting Soros, with Nazi imagery.<\/p>\n

Some ultra-wealthy individuals, such as Charles and David Koch, who control the second-largest privately owned company in the US, really do use their wealth in opaque and subversive ways<\/a>. It is they, not Soros and his transparent Open Society Foundations, who represent the real threat to our politics and societies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the centuries, Jews have been blamed for all sorts of ills in Christian and Muslim societies, from the Great Plague of the 14th century to the financial crashes of modern times. 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