The Case for George Soros
He's way better than the gangsters, and "Jews Against Soros" is a trap
One thing most people don’t understand is that the campaign against George Soros is largely a Likud thing, concocted by the notorious political consultant Arthur Finkelstein.
There is a way much of the rhetoric around Israel recapitulates itself in exactly the same ways over the years. The ADL has been proffering the “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism” argument for a half-century, for instance. And Finkelstein’s anti-Soros campaign has had a second life under Josh Hammer, who, as you can see in the photo above, is one degree of separation from Israel’s Crime Minister.
The theory of Finkelstein’s campaign here is to let right-wingers project any anti-Semitic conspiracy theory onto Soros himself, rather than Jews writ large, and they’ll give you permission to do that. Think about how cynical this is on the part of convicted felon Adam Milstein:
Or Yair Netanyahu:
The Israeli American Council, which Milstein is involved with, was where much of the illegal influence campaign described by James Bamford took place.
The current Jews Against Soros group doesn’t represent anything close to the mainstream of Jewish opinion in the United States. Frick and frack here are Hammer and Will Scharf, an attorney for President Trump who’s running for attorney general in Missouri. Hammer was also recently put on-air in St. Louis. I don’t know, maybe the plan here is to make him the next Mark Levin—Sinclair has a long habit of stuffing conservatives’ mouths with dogshit and telling them to smile and chew.
They’re both embarrassing themselves. At this moment, what needs to happen if Trump wants to be president again is he needs to make it clear that he intends for the FBI to enforce the law, and pay attention to the ways Israeli technology is integrated with the U.S. government to the detriment of our security and national interests. I don’t think either of these guys have any interest in that.
At the end of the day the Likudniks don’t like Soros because he keeps his distance from the Israeli state. I don’t agree with everything Soros has ever done, but that’s one thing to like about him. He’s also pretty much the only Jewish oligarch to have opposed the Iraq War.
The way this plays into how Hungary has become a nesting ground for the nationalist right in exile is interesting. Whatever the hopes of Atlanticists for Hungary, it’s not very likely that any government there will alter substantially its comparatively pro-Russian posture. There are all sorts of cultural and geopolitical reasons why it’s likely to end up the most pro-Russian Visegrad country.
The question is would you rather Hungary be pro-Russia and pro-Israel, or pro-Russia and at a distance from Israel? If you ask me, the latter is clearly preferable, as the spyware scandal in Hungary has made clear. The devil’s bargain Viktor Orbán made is, the Likudniks would absolve him of charges of anti-Semitism, as long as he imported Israeli transnational repression and digital authoritarianism. That doesn’t wash.
And you can kind of see the reaction on the other side of that deal too. Jobbik, Orbán’s right-wing opposition, moderated, they put a Jewish guy in its top ranks, and they started to get good press from what you might call the Mitteleuropa deep state. I haven’t followed it closely enough to know if they’ve dropped the platform plank about the gypsies.
Hammer blocked me on Twitter at some point in the run-up to the recent Gaza conflict, but my read is he’s basically the Likud chaperone for a lot of this new right stuff, and recently married an Israeli woman. He is currently in Israel cheering on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Under his leadership Newsweek has been willing to expand the edges of right-wing opinion, but the fact is it’s a sucker’s game to allow strong partisans of Israel to determine the limits of the discourse here. And if it’s a choice between Likudnik gangsters and Soros, I’ll take Soros.
Whether or not it’s true that “George Soros is a destructive civilizational force in America, Israel, his native Hungary, and throughout the West more generally,” as Josh Hammer has claimed, it is certainly not possible to build up Western Civilization through Israeli gangsterism and Chinese money, which is what his faction is trying to do. Many of the anti-Soros Zionist activists have taken the side of people who have betrayed the United States, like Farley Weiss, a big defender of Jonathan Pollard. I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in carrying the banner of Western Civilization alongside people who are encouraging treason.
Or, for that matter, terrorism:
This is a literal convicted supporter of terrorism here. This is indecent, and not in American interests.
The phrase the Likudniks use in their advocacy is to say they want a “strong U.S.-Israel relationship.” They use the word “relationship” because Israel is not an ally, and they don’t want it to be one in any formal sense. What one does in a healthy relationship is codify it: people who are in love and want to have children get married, which is a contract. The Israel lobby prefers to treat the U.S. like a baby mama or a mistress. They don’t actually want the relationship to be subject to, for instance, normal diplomatic protocols or even U.S. law.
The tell with various writers, activists and political people in this area is they are always trying to explain the Israeli position to the U.S. and get Americans to adopt it, rather than trying to determine what the American view with respect to Israel ought to be. This is, functionally, the same thing a foreign lobbyist does. And that is how we ought to regard Josh Hammer.
You are one of the few sane conservative voices willing to address Israel's constant interference in American politics. When I point out that the "relationship" is a one-way street I am invariably called an anti-Semite. This Gaza adventure has exposed the true priorities of many conservatives I had formerly admired. However, I will continue to despise Soros for other reasons. He is a pure internationalist and as amoral as they come.