Caroline Glick: Soros, antisemitism and the progressive assault on language
Soros’s Open Society Foundations have given tens of millions of dollars to non-governmental organizations involved in waging political warfare and lawfare against Israel. Soros’s groups reject the Jewish state’s right to exist and its right to defend itself. They have sought to undermine its relations with foreign governments and subvert its legal system in order to prevent it from enforcing its laws against Palestinian terrorists and Arab Israelis who break the laws of their country.Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer: It Is a mitzvah to condemn George Soros
Two Soros-funded organizations, Al-Haq and Al-Mezan, have been identified as fronts for the PFLP terrorist organization. The U.S., the E.U., Canada and Israel all designate the PFLP as a terror group. Israel’s Defense Ministry outed Al-Haq and Al-Mezan as PFLP fronts in Oct. 2021. Rather than abandon their support for the terrorist groups, 20 other Soros-funded organizations signed a declaration attacking the government’s move.
Soros-funded international, U.S., Israeli and Palestinian groups defame Israel and its supporters by, among other things, falsely accusing the Jewish state of “apartheid.” They wage economic and cultural warfare against Israel and its Jewish supporters around the world through boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns. Directed against Israel’s Jewish supporters abroad, particularly on college campuses, BDS campaigns aim to deny Jews their civil right to stand with the Jewish state or express support for its existence. These campaigns employ social ostracism, humiliation and harassment. Soros-funded groups were the primary engine behind the E.U.’s antisemitic labelling law, which requires Israeli exporters to place warning labels on goods produced by Jews beyond the 1949 armistice lines.
Soros has spearheaded and funds organizations whose job is to drive a wedge through the American Jewish community. In 2007, he published an article in The New York Review of Books demonizing AIPAC, which he attacked with language redolent of antisemitism. The next year, Soros founded J Street by providing a three-year grant of $750,000. The pro-Palestinian progressive Jewish group supports placing restrictions on U.S. military assistance to Israel. It backs some of the most anti-Israel members of Congress. It advocates on behalf of U.S. appeasement of the Iranian regime, including by facilitating its nuclear weapons program.
J Street U, J Street’s student group, is anti-Israel. IfNotNow is a BDS group and a spin-off of J Street U. J Street and its aligned groups routinely demonize pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC and the Jewish Federations for their support for Israel. They also seek to subvert Jewish institutions, including day schools and summer camps, by compelling their leaders to accept the dissemination of anti-Zionist curricula and propaganda to their students and campers.
Soros-funded Palestinian media routinely broadcast antisemitic propaganda.
In short, Soros funds groups that demonize the Jewish state and Jewish people worldwide who support it. He has split the American Jewish community and supports organizations that oppose the right of Jewish people in the United States to defend and support the Jewish state and its right to exist.
If it is not “anti-Catholic” to condemn disastrous policies advocated by such Catholics as President Joe Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it is not anti-Semitic to condemn the pernicious Soros, who most significantly finances campaigns to elect such lawless DAs.Jonathan Tobin: Christiane Amanpour and the institutionalization of media bias
Yes, it would be anti-Semitic if a cartoon depicted Soros with a Jewish religious symbol like a yarmulke because Judaism as a religion and George Soros do not intersect. Even in a cartoon, a kipah of any style or size would not fit on Soros’s head.
In Israel, too, his evil and toxic hand poisons everything he touches. He has heavily funded J Street — no surprise there — an organization that works closely with boycott, divestment, sanctions advocates and that honors Israel-haters as invited guest speakers at J Street annual conferences. In Israel, Soros’s Open Society Foundation has donated to organizations accusing Israel of human rights violations and war crimes, such as “Breaking the Silence” and “Adalah.” In a 2016 leak of OSF emails, staffers said they sought to weaken ties between Israel and the EU and sow doubt about Israeli democracy. He is noxious.
Soros is working to destroy foundational principles and democratic institutions in both America and Israel. I am a rabbi with a lifelong career of Jewish commitment and devotion, and I cannot be more clear: It is not only patriotic but a mitzvah to stand up and condemn this enemy of all we as Jews hold dear.
In the early days of Amanpour’s long career, few, if any, journalists openly boasted of their partisanship in the way that she now does. That changed in the wake of the rise of former President Donald Trump and the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020 in which a press corps that everyone knew was overwhelmingly liberal shucked off any pretense that they were not partisans.How CNN Continues to Promote Anti-Israel Views
That made itself felt in the coverage of the 2016 presidential election and subsequent promotion of the Russia collusion hoax that dogged Trump during his first three years in office. It was shown in the willingness of almost every mainstream outlet—with the active cooperation of Big Tech companies and social-media platforms—to shut down coverage of the New York Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its damning evidence about the corrupt business dealings of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate’s family in the waning days of that campaign.
And, most recently, it was manifest in the coverage of the report by special counsel John Durham about the origins of the Russia collusion hoax by corporate outlets like CNN and The New York Times, in which they ignored the findings that the entire investigation was the work of the Hillary Clinton campaign and then initiated by the FBI without any actual evidence.
Of course, bias exists on the right, too. But the monolithic nature of so much of the mainstream media makes it particularly problematic.
We are now at the point where anyone who gets their news solely from those supposedly reliable sources, like CNN and the Times, are among the least informed people on the planet. That is nothing less than a tragedy since democracy is imperiled if there isn’t a mainstream press that can be relied upon to at least try to tell the truth.
Anti-Israel media bias was always terrible, but it was long thought of as an aberration caused by particular factors, such as ignorance of the history of the Middle East conflict by editors and reporters, as well as the failure of the Jewish state to make its case in an easily digested and compelling manner.
We are now at the point when the sort of bias exhibited by the likes of Amanpour against Israel is routine in just about everything that is produced by corporate liberal outlets. Biased journalism has become not so much a lamentable exception to the rule as it has been institutionalized.
Israel is particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon, and the consequences are deeply troubling. The unfair treatment of the Jewish state such as that committed by Amanpour is a factor in the rising tide of antisemitism that masquerades as mere criticism of Israel. The fact that such lies and distortions are now routine occurrences in the mainstream press is a symptom of a sickness in journalism that goes beyond the way her conduct is abetting Jew-hatred.
The passive voice, however, was used for the deliberate murders of Lucy Dee and her two daughters: “There was a shooting incident.” Not a “killing.” A “shooting incident.” And “a car received a bullet shot.”What a bizarre construction. And then that car that “received a [presumably single] bullet shot” just happened to have “the [Dee] family in it.” The way the account was phrased leaves one with the impression that the mother emerged unscathed, because she is not mentioned as a victim; Pleitgen says only that “the two daughters were killed in that crash.” Nor were the daughters “killed” in a car crash. Their car crashed after they had been shot to to death by a Palestinian terrorist, armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. After the crash, he kept firing; the victims were reportedly shot a total of 22 times. That does justice, unflinchingly, to the event. Pleitgen’s account was a travesty of the truth.
Here is how CNN”s Frederik Pleitgen ought to have reported the story: “A Palestinian terrorist with a Kalashnikov shot and killed an Israeli mother, Lucy Dee, and two of her daughters, Maina and Rina, as they drove through the West Bank on April 7.”
Christine Amanpour has quite a history of anti-Israel animus. This past January, she interviewed an Israeli documentary film maker, Dror Moreh. Toward the end, Amanpour asked Moreh:
“You are an Israeli. I don’t know whether you were in Israel at the time, but you said that this red line in the neighboring country of Syria, where all these atrocities were being committed really, really made you angry and upset. Many will want to know, you know, do you feel equally angry about the horrible situation that’s going on in your own country, and the human rights attacks, killings of Palestinians. Obviously, we know Israelis are also attacked, but what is your perspective, as an Israeli, given the whole “never again” paradigm in which you place this investigation?”