in an op ed piece at NBC titled My father, George Soros, is white supremacists' favorite target. But they won't stop us with the subtitle of “The surge in online smears of my father and me amid the Black Lives Matter movement is simply one more installment in a long, ugly story.”
Alexander Soros is Deputy Chair of his father’s Open Society Foundations.
One would either have to be willfully oblivious or in a coma to not realize how much of a boogeyman George Soros has been for the anti-Semitic Rightwing over the past few years. This has intensified in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, with George Soros being blamed for events around the Black Lives Matter movement as he was previously blamed for the “caravan” of which Trump made such an issue in the run-up to the 2018 election. But this is not hew. As Alexander Soros notes
Blaming Jews for mass civil rights movements is a textbook white supremacy tactic that has been around for longer than anyone reading this article has been alive. The logic is simple: Those who promote these lies want you to believe that Black and brown people are not smart or strategic enough to organize such actions themselves, so Jews must be pulling the strings.
Further, he ties these groups to the “replacement” theory that we heard all too clearly in the change “Jews will not replace us!” in the horror that was Charlottesville, which is why I used a photo of that obscenity to illustrate this posting. After all, Alexander Soros notes of the vile online antisemitic garbage to which his father has been subjected
This despicably racist online poison uses ideas and imagery that are directly drawn from the anti-Jewish propaganda of Nazi Germany — although the "replacement" theory remains a distinctly American manifestation of white supremacy. In 2017, American fascists chanted "Jews will not replace us" as they marched by torchlight in Charlottesville, Virginia. In his last online post, Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, accused Jews of "bring[ing] in invaders that kill our people."
The author of this strong piece will remind or inform you, depending upon your prior knowledge, of his father’s background, as a Jew who survived the Holocaust in Hungary (most of whose Jews were transported to Auschwitz by Eichmann) and who as a result has been dedicated to the ideal of open and more just societies, as is explained by these words:
Since the early 1980s, he has given away more than $15 billion to further the ideal of an "open society" in which equality and the protection of one's fundamental individual rights are paramount.
It is not charity, and his outlook represents more than mere solidarity with others who have endured similar fates. He believes in an open society because Jews and other minorities need rights and equality under the law to prevent another Holocaust.
There is much more in this worthy piece, which I urge you to read.
While I do not religiously identify as Jewish, my last name is Bernstein and I lost extended family when the Jewish community of Bialystok Poland was liquidated. My own involvement in Civil Rights flowed precisely from my being of Eastern European Jewish background, which mean that I rejected the notion of discrimination and intolerance on the basis of race or religion, and as I matured also of sexism, homophobia, or national origin, to name just some of the ways some people choose to demean and diminish others.
Alexander Soros makes clear that neither he nor his father will be intimidated or silenced, whether by allies of Donald Trump in this country or the despots in other countries, people such as Vladi=mir Putin or in his father’s native Hungary Viktor Orban.
So let me close as Alexander Soros does, with these words, followed by one more observation:
We will continue to fight to eradicate systemic racism in America. And we will never stop fighting the bigotry of those who sow discord, spread lies and engage in hateful, anti-Semitic rhetoric
For me, it is hateful rhetoric of any kind, and that includes demonizing political opponents. That’s me. I don’t impose that on others.
Peace?