One of the central features of anti-Semitic ideology is the all-powerful
global Jewish financier. In previous times the Rothschild family fulfilled this
role, today it is George Soros. The Jewish World Conspiracy Theory, whereby Jews
control both capitalism and communism is personified in such a person. Jewish
capitalists were supposed to have funded the Bolshevik revolution and Hitler’s anti-Semitism
stemmed from his belief that Communism was a Jewish creation. [Jewish Bolshevism]


It needs to be said that Soros, who was one of those who funded a range of anti-Communist groups in the former Soviet Block is no revolutionary. But his funding of liberal and civil society groups, including human rights organisations and his opposition to Brexit has aroused the ire of a broad swathe of the Right, including the neo-Nazi and overtly anti-Semitic Right.  The image of Soros that the anti-Semites portray is a fiction, it is the traditional anti-semitic image of the manipulative Jewish financier.  It bears no resemblance to Soros just as anti-semitic imagery also bears no relation to Jews. But the fact that Soros is a billionaire speculator is no justification for anti-semitic attacks on him.

Battle of Waterloo

In 1940 the Nazis produced a film Die Rothschilds
Aktien auf Waterloo about Nathan Rothschild and how he made his fortune
out of the bloodshed of Waterloo. It was based on a pamphlet which took the
Europe of 1846 by storm. It still
resonates to this day.

There
are even some fools in the Palestine solidarity movement who trace the
existence of Israel to ‘the Rothschilds’. In fact the actual relationship
between this family and the Zionist movement was a very mixed one. At the
outset ‘Herzl appealed
in vain to
wealthy Jews such as Baron Hirsch and Baron Rothschild, to join the national
Zionist movement.’ Lionel
Nathan de Rothschild founded
the anti-Zionist League of British Jews in 1917.

The
Rothschilds have been replaced by the figure of George Soros, who was a child
survivor of the Hungarian Holocaust. Soros has become the unifying figure for
the anti-Semitic and Zionist Right.

Glenn Beck outlining the tentacles of George Soros, the great financial manipulator

According
to Glenn Beck Soros was “the puppetmaster” –
a Jewish financier with ties to no nation, intent on creating a “one world government” and subverting the
United States. It is an anti-Semitic phrase that the Sun
also used on a headline when attacking Soros over Brexit before quickly
withdrawing it.

Beck
described
how “Eighty years ago George Soros was
born, little did people know that economies would collapse, currencies would
become worthless, elections would be stolen.” Gideon Rachman describes how ‘The nastiest moment (amongst much
competition) comes when Beck tries to claim that the 14-year-old Soros came
from an anti-semitic family and himself participated in the persecution of the
Jews during the Holocaust.’

In April Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party won a two-thirds majority in a campaign
against the absent Soros. Orbán
ran his campaign on the single issue of migration. Orban accused Soros of a ‘plot… to send millions of migrants to
Hungary.’

All of Orban’s anti-Semitic venom was
encapsulated in his speech of 15th March commemorating the 170th
anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. It is, to be sure, a classic
summation of the caricature of the Jew as a rootless cosmopolitan, owing
loyalty to nothing but his own purse.

“We must fight against an opponent which is different from us. Their
faces are not visible, but are hidden from view; they do not fight directly,
but by stealth; they are not honourable, but unprincipled; they are not
national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with
money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs. They are
not generous, but vengeful, and always attack the heart—especially if it is
red, white and green.”

Evolve politics, which describes itself as ‘truly independent’ thus making me immediately suspicious, describes
how the Tories have appointed one Roger
Scruton, on the far-Right of British politics to
chair an architecture quango.  Scruton
was Editor of the Salisbury
Review, a Tory magazine which believed Margaret
Thatcher was a dangerous radical, for 18 years. 

Luciana Berger, Labour Zionist MP, takes objection to the appointment of Roger Scruton whilst turning a blind eye to Israel’s love affair with Orban

More hypocrisy from an MP who is a last ditch defender of Israel’s racist policies

In an example of the hypocrisy that passes for Zionist politics Luciana
Berger, the Labour Zionist MP who fronts the Jewish Labour Movement and spends
most of her time attacking Jeremy Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’ had the audacity
to say that ‘An individual who peddles
antisemitic conspiracy theories has no place advising government about
anything.’ Quite why this should be so when Sir Eric Pickles was
until recently in the Cabinet is difficulty to understand.  Naturally opportunist rent a mouth MP Wes
Streeting joined in. Both of them were aghast because Scruton was a supporter
of Viktor Orban.  Why the surprise?

Tory
MEPs have just voted to defend
Orban in the European parliament. The same Tory MEPs sit
in the European Conservative Reform group with at least 3 anti-Semitic parties
with barely a murmur from the Zionists.

Orban’s ‘outstanding statesman’ with friend – Zionist labour can’t criticise the Tories support for Orban without asking why Orban was a guest of honour in Israel last July

I
have repeatedly
written that Orban has called Admiral Horthy, the pro-Nazi ruler of Hungary
who presided over the deportation to Auschwitz of nearly half a million Jews an
“exceptional statesmen”.  None of
this prevented Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu visiting Orban on a state visit
in the summer of 2017.

Add caption

I
also described how ‘Orban dedicated a
nasty and vicious poster campaign to attacking Soros last year, replete with
all the anti-Semitic dog whistles that only he was capable of.  Hungary’s Jewish community was up in arms.’  Why
are anti-Semitic regimes so attractive to Israel and the Zionist movement?

Anti-semitic Republican cartoon attacking Democrate candidate – with fistful of dollars in her hand – the dogs are whistling

Reuters
reported
last year that ‘Israel’s
ambassador to Hungary issued a statement denouncing the campaign, saying it “evokes
sad memories but also sows hatred and fear”, an apparent reference to
Hungary’s part in the deportation of half a million Jews during the Holocaust.
But here’s the strange thing. Netanyahu ‘hit
the roof. He wasn’t going to have his closest ally in Europe attacked because
of a little local anti-Semitism.’

Hours
after the Ambassador made his comments, a spokesman for Israel’s foreign
ministry, issued a “clarification” saying
that Soros was a legitimate target for criticism. Surprise,
surprise!

In 2017 Orban launched a poster campaign against George Soros in Budapest as part of his campaign to close Soros’s European University – when the Israeli Ambassador uttered a few mild criticisms he was forced to retract by Netanyahu

“In no way was the statement (by the
ambassador) meant to delegitimize criticism of George Soros, who continuously
undermines Israel’s democratically elected governments,” said foreign ministry
spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon, adding that Soros funded organizations “that defame
the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself”. Israel backs Hungary, says financier Soros is a
threat

As
Evolve observes

‘Orban even went as far
as commissioning a deeply
antisemitic advertising campaign that plastered Soros’ grinning face on
billboards with the caption “Don’t let George Soros have the last laugh.“

What
Netanyahu is saying is that Soros helps fund Israeli human rights groups like B’tselem
and in Netanyahu’s eyes this counts as ‘undermining’ his police state regime. All
of this took place without a murmur from Luciana.  Because of course she had bigger fish to fry
namely Corbyn and it wouldn’t do to criticise her favourite state (Israel in
case you wondered) as anti-Semitic.

Yair Netanyahu’s anti-semitic cartoon of Soros attracted rare praise for a Jew from the Daily Stormer – possibly a first

Daily Stormer

None
of this is surprising, because to Netanyahu Soros is the anti-Christ (we don’t
have an anti-Moses!). Netanyahu’s son, Yair, helpfully posted a nice anti-Semitic
cartoon of Soros at the centre of a conspiracy, complete with Lizard to
undermine the Israeli state.  Praise came
from neo-Nazi former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke no less.  Indeed Andrew Anglin, editor of the neo-Nazi Daily
Stormer joined in the congratulations, which is no mean feat since he has sworn
never to talk to or meet a Jew.

David Duke, neo-Nazi ex-KKK gives his approval to antisemitic cartoon by Netanyahu’s son Yair

Not
it should be thought that Orban is the only anti-Semite that Netanyahu has
close and friendly relations with.  Poland’s
Law and Justice Party is just as close which is why when Poland passed a law
making criticism of Polish collaboration with the Nazis a criminal offence, Netanyahu
moved quickly to head off criticism by concocting a deal with them that left
the legislation in place. The
Real Reason Netanyahu Gave Cover To Holocaust Deniers

Holocaust survivors and anti-racist Israelis picket Yad Vashem during Orban’s visit

The Soros Myth – Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Undermining and Delegitimizing of Protest

Racism, Antisemitism, ideas of “outside agitators”
are the right’s most effective tools for delegitimizing the message and
messengers of social justice. If protest can be blamed on those outside, both
the message and the messenger are untrustworthy.

October 11,
2018 Dove Kent; Jewish Currents (Portside)

Protestors opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, September 2018., Photo: Mobilus In Mobili via Flickr // Jewish Currents

For decades, the right has undermined Black protest and resistance
movements as “violent,” “dangerous,” and “un-American” and has responded with
militarized force. Under this administration, Trump and his allies are
replicating and amplifying this strategy, using misogyny and antisemitism to
further erode the basic foundations of political participation.

In response to weeks of women and trans protests demanding that Judge
Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault, be removed from
consideration for the Supreme Court, Donald Trump tweeted out:

The very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals only looking to
make Senators look bad. 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

This was quickly followed by a retweeted antisemitic message from Rudy
Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and a longtime Republican leader, calling Soros the
enemy of Christ:

Follow the money. I think Soros is the anti-Christ! He must go! Freeze
his assets & I bet the protests stop.

Trump and his allies’ deployment of misogyny and antisemitism in this
moment are attempts to  undermine our movements, echoing ways the right
wing has long attacked protest movements on the left. The power of protest lies
in its credibility as the voice of public opinion. If women and trans
protestors can be dismissed as pawns or operatives rather than agents of social
change, then the power of protest is weakened. If a single Jew can be blamed
for orchestrating the whole affair, then the power of protest is further
eroded.

Birds of a feather and all that

This antisemitic rhetoric from the state echoes among white
nationalists. In the days following Trump’s tweet and Brett Kavanaugh’s
confirmation to the Supreme Court, fliers
(created by the Daily Stormer) appeared on college campuses and in cities in California and New York. The
fliers blamed Jews for orchestrating the assault allegations brought against
Judge Kavanaugh. They read: “Every time some anti-white, anti-American,
anti-freedom event takes place, you look at it, and it’s Jews behind it.” The
Northern Virginia Jewish Community Center (the community center I grew up in)
was vandalized with dozens of swastikas.

Trump’s white nationalist audience knows what he means when he points
the finger at Soros—he’s invoking a time-tested antisemitic strategy for
undermining social movements. According to Jews for
Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ)
Board Member Dania Rajendra:

Antisemitism and the idea of “outside agitators” is the right’s most
effective tool for delegitimizing both the message and messengers of social
justice. If protest can be blamed on those outside of the state, then both
the message and the messenger are untrustworthy. Delegitimizing both is
necessary to eventually repress or expel said “troublemakers” by the forces of
“law and order.” And in fact, we saw the president say exactly that to a
conference of police the same week as his post-Kavanaugh-protest Soros tweet.

We know that we need a strong, vibrant, awake electorate holding elected
officials accountable. Undermining the credibility of protest is an extremely
effective tool of protecting those in power.

Right-wing regimes have long broken down the fabric of political protest
by using the antisemitic notion of rich Jewish financiers as the “puppet
masters” of social unrest. During the Russian Revolution, the Tsar’s secret
police published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional
account of a meeting of rich Jews plotting to break down the society of their
“host countries” and rule the world through the promotion of social upheaval.
For a period, the Protocols did its job to undermine and
destabilize the revolution against the Tsar. Because of its success, it’s been
translated and promoted by right-wing ideologues around the world ever since.

The Protocols gave us dog whistle terms like
“globalist,” a slur associated with Jews that paint them as untrustworthy,
ready to betray the nations of their residence in service of an unseen
authority. The general idea, from JFREJ’s resource Understanding
Antisemitism: An Offering to our Movement, is that “Jews are a powerful, corrupting influence on otherwise good,
pure people—insidious troublemakers with a nefarious agenda at odds with that
of the good, ‘true’ citizens of a nation.”

During McCarthyism, these well known stereotypes about Jews were used to
tar communists and leftist movement activists (Jewish and non-Jewish) as
untrustworthy, two-faced “troublemakers” with foreign loyalties detrimental to
the United States. The over-representation of Jews and non-Jewish people of
color (always seen as suspect by the white owning class) in leftist movement
circles made these claims plausible. Through institutional state repression and
violence—blacklisting, closures of organizations, and ultimately the public
execution of the Rosenbergs—the Red Scare successfully decimated the social
fabric of leftist movements.

It is deeply troubling to see these same tropes, indeed some of the very
same language, being used against today’s social movements by the
president and leaders of the Republican party. Trump and other Republicans have
regularly claimed that George Soros (the central target of this anti-Semitic
messaging) is entirely behind the Movement for Black Lives. Here racism and
antisemitism intersect: rather than admit that a strong, powerful Black
liberation movement is growing throughout the US, some white
people would believe that it is
one or a few rich Jews propping up Black people to cause unrest in the streets
and undermine white Christian society.

It’s not just antisemitism on its own, but antisemitism deployed against
the left that gives the lie about Soros its cultural power. Our side
can point out that right-wing efforts are funded by the Koch, Walton and Mercer
families all day long, but that fact and its broadcast never delegitimizes
their endeavors. That’s because the Soros lie—the invocation of the idea of the
scary, untrustworthy Jew—is built on top of a bunch of other assumptions: that
“real” Americans are Christian and white, and hew to patriarchal
gender norms and racial segregation.

Luckily, we know how to fight back. We can recognize the ways in which
racism, antisemitism, and misogyny are deployed to keep our movements weak and
divided and we can refuse to fall for conspiracy theories. We can join together
in the raw, tough, honest work of building multi-racial, multi-gender,
multi-class, multi-faith movements. We can center the leadership of those most
impacted. We can collectively disinvest from whiteness and practice
multi-racial democracy in everything we do.

In the face of the destructive attacks of the extreme right wing, we
have an opportunity to respond with a solidarity that buttresses and expands
democracy—a rebuttal to an oppressive past and a promise for a liberated
future.

[Dove Kent is an organizer, educator, and movement builder based in
Durham, North Carolina. She is the former Executive Director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice.]

Trump and McConnell Take
Gaslighting to New Level in Kavanaugh Confirmation Fight

The use of an anti-Semitic trope to condemn protesters for exercising
their First Amendment rights signals a turning point in the authoritarian
trajectory of our politics.

By Adele M. Stan

October 5, 2018
The American
Prospect

President Trump arrives for a campaign rally in Rochester, Minnesota, on October 4, 2018. credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci  //  The American Prospect

The confirmation process for President Donald J. Trump’s Supreme
Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, continues to be a significant test of the
U.S. form of government, and a display of high drama.

Washington, D.C., was only on its third cup of coffee when the presidential
tweethit: “The very rude elevator
screamers are paid professionals only looking to make Senators look bad,” wrote
Trump. “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.”

He was speaking, of course, of the sexual assault survivors—mostly
women—who have been following the example set by Ana Maria Archila and Maria
Gallagher when they famously confronted
Republican Senator Jeff Flake by
holding his elevator door open and imploring him to consider the experiences of
those who have been targets of sexual assault when deciding whether to vote for
moving the nomination to the Senate floor.

Before long, speaking from the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell—who had recently promised the religious right that he and his caucus
planned to “plow right through”
the confirmation—complained of the “harm” he said was done to Kavanaugh and his
family because of allegations of sexual assault made against him by Christine
Blasey Ford, a psychology professor from California. Then McConnell cast the
thousands of protesters who have come to the U.S. Capitol buildings in
opposition to the nomination as “the mob.”

In both instances, these national leaders branded people exercising their
First Amendment rights as dangerous.

In both instances, these national leaders branded people exercising
their First Amendment rights as dangerous.McConnell complained of security
threats to senators. And Trump trotted out the right’s favorite code word for
its ideology of anti-Semitism. That word is “Soros.”

In both the fever swamps of the American right, and the forests of
Europe’s right-wing nationalist movements, the hedge fund billionaire George
Soros—a Jewish Holocaust survivor born in Hungary—has become a favorite
bogeyman because of his support of liberal and civil-society groups.
In Europe, he is cast as a destroyer of Europe’s Christian values. (His Open
Society Foundation was pushed out of Hungary, which also recently passed
anti-immigration legislation dubbed the “Stop Soros”
law.) He’s also a favorite target of
the U.S. right, where invocation of his name carries the same sort of
anti-Semitic code. Here, he’s reviled for donating to progressive and liberal
groups, and has consequently become fodder for the conspiracy theorists of the
right.

One racist congratulating another

Characterizations of Soros by right-wing figures follow the outline of
old anti-Semitic tropes such as the fabricated “Protocols of
the Elders of Zion,” and conspiracies supposedly
involving the Rothschild
family.

This is the strategy of authoritarians. Create fear that chaos created
by backlash to the authoritarian’s exercise of raw power is really taking place
at the direction of one very powerful enemy. Discourage people from public
protest by painting the opposition as “evil,” as Trump did in the Mississippi rally he led this week, where he mocked Ford
for her inability to remember every single little detail of the 1982 evening on
which she says she was assaulted by Kavanaugh.

“These are really evil people,” Trump said of Ford and the Democrats who
insisted on her right to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose
job it is to vet nominees to the federal bench. Note that among the right-wing evangelicals who comprise much of Trump’s base, “evil” is regarded as an
existential spiritual threat, the stuff of Satan.

As I write this, the outcome of the final vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination
to sit on the highest court in the land is not certain. But the clampdown is
coming—a clampdown on dissent, a clampdown on access to the levers of
congressional process by the president’s opponents.

As I write this, the outcome of the final vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination
to sit on the highest court in the land is not certain. But the clampdown is
coming—a clampdown on dissent, a clampdown on access to the levers of congressional
process by the president’s opponents. As McConnell promised, he really has
“plow[ed] right through” this nomination process, complete with a final FBI
report on the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh that, through
circumscription of inquiry imposed by the White House, amounted to a whitewash.

The exercise of authoritarian power is not anything that Trump,
McConnell, and their allies even attempt to conceal at this point. It’s
happening in front of your face. Pay attention. Take note of the signs. But
don’t let it keep you from the streets, or from the voting booth.

The republic as we have known it could cease to exist if we allow it.
And that time is growing closer. They’re playing for all the marbles. They
mustn’t be allowed to win.

[Adele M. Stan is a columnist for The American
Prospect. She is research director of People for the American Way, and a
winner of the Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism.]