Thaindian News

November 14, 2010 (Pen Men at Work): 80-year-old George Soros happens to be a billionaire financier of America with Hungarian bloodline. He was born in Budapest in Hungary and endured the Nazi German occupation of Hungary, which was rather oppressive. The conquest of Hungary by the Nazis was another gruesome and lugubrious chapter in the history of the Holocaust that saw millions of Jews being slaughtered and deported to the squalid concentration camps. Soros escaped unscathed from Nazi Hungary and eventually settled in America. He is one of the wealthiest Americans today and bequeaths massive money to the liberal campaigns that he supports.

Earlier this week, Glenn Beck, a traditionalist and rightist media pundit associated with Fox News, had referred to Soros as a Jewish boy, who, selfishly, for his survival, enabled the banishment of his fellow Jews to the terrifying concentration camps in Nazi-controlled Hungary. But Beck also acknowledged that survival in Nazi Hungary must have been unimaginably difficult. Nevertheless, these remarks by Beck have now engendered a controversy and he is under fire.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a powerful equality organization, has disparaged Beck’s observations about Soros’ childhood, with its national director, Abraham Foxman, labeling Beck’s analysis as juvenile, distasteful and exaggerated.

Foxman, however, subsequently mentioned to salon.com that he still deemed that Beck was a dedicated defender of Israel and the Jewish race. Meanwhile, a representative of Beck has pointed out that Foxman had, in a correspondence on October 22, lauded Beck’s friendliness towards the Israelis. This correspondence has been published now on Beck’s website.

The battle between Soros, who is an opponent of the political right, and Beck, who is as rightist as once can possibly be, is not new. Some backers of ADL have been distributing communications in which they have registered Beck as a celebrity, who has discharged anti-Semitic comments.