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Anti-Semitism Has a New Name

Beyond offering funding for ameliorative programs, George Soros uses his philanthropy to advance a vision of a truly free society governed by democratically accountable leaders. It is this dimension of Soros’ work that has always made Jews a target of the far right.

MADRID – Over the centuries, Jews have been blamed for all sorts of ills in Christian and Muslim societies, from the Great Plague of the fourteenth century to the financial crashes of modern times. In 1903, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, produced by Imperial Russia’s secret police, “exposed” a diabolical Jewish plot to achieve world domination by promoting liberalism – and became a pretext for anti-Semitism in Europe. These narratives endure to this day, only now they are being projected onto a single Jew: George Soros.

Right-wing, anti-globalist conspiracy theorists – a group that now includes US President Donald Trump – demonize Soros, a wealthy Jew who is deeply committed to liberal causes. The former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly described Soros in 2007 as “off-the-chart dangerous,” and “an extremist who wants open borders, a one-world foreign policy, legalized drugs, euthanasia, and on and on.” For the Texas-based Infowars founder Alex Jones, Soros is nothing less than “the head of the Jewish mafia” conspiring to derail Trump’s presidency.

Such figures imagine the hidden hand of the “leftist billionaire” almost everywhere. When a caravan of desperate Central American asylum-seekers began walking all the way to the United States border before the recent US midterm elections, it was a ploy by Soros to win a Democratic majority in Congress. When survivors of February’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, launched a gun-control campaign, Soros was supposedly bankrolling them. And it was Soros who arranged for Christine Blasey Ford to testify that Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, had sexually assaulted her.

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