Abe Foxman, the head of teh Anti Defamation League is out with strong criticism of Glenn Beck for his comments about what George Soros did during teh holocaust. Beck said on his radio show that as a 13-year-old Jewish boy, Soros who was posing as a Christian and living with a Christian family to avoid the Nazis—"used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. … It was frightening. Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps." Beck did not say that Soros was actively sending people to death camps, but that he was accompanying someone who was actually doing that.
Foxman's criticism, however, was "To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant." To me, Foxman has just taken this too far.
Foxman should remember that what Beck said was true. Soros acknowledges both that he escaped the Nazis by posing as a member of a Christian family and that he accompanied his protector, whose job was to confiscate property from Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, as he performed his duties.
On "60 Minutes", the interviewer told Soros that it sounded like "an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years." Soros responded that he doesn't feel guilty for what happened because "I was only a spectator".
At most, Beck overstated the point by saying that Soros helped send Jews to the camps when what he was doing was to help confiscate their property in the first step towards sending them to the camps.
There is no question that the Holocaust was one of the most horrible chapters in human history. However, the fact that someone was caught in the midst of this abhorrent event does not make that person immune from discussion. Foxman wands to use the Holocaust as a club to cut off discussion. Such an attempt is both shortsighted and wrongheaded. Trying to cut off discussion about the Holocaust may be part of the PC playbook, but it plays into the hands of those who want to either ignore or deny that it ever happened. The best policy is to make public the details of that horror. Imagine that Soros as a boy had to accompany his protector on the rounds of confiscating Jewish property just to survive. Beck calls this "frightening", but, in truth, it is far worse than frightening.
Maybe Foxman would do better if he focused on current anti-semitism. He should be more concerned with pro-Palestinian activists who spread lies about Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians at campuses across the country than about a mention of what George Soros did some 65 years ago.
It will also be interesting to see if Soros has made or is about to make any new contributions to the ADL.
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