The TV show host from the popular TV channel Fox News Glenn Beck was criticized by the influential Jewish organization Anti-Defamation League for his on-screen attacks against the billionaire George Soros.
In three of his shows this week, Beck called Soros, who was born to a Hungarian Jewish family, a “puppet master” who is “notorious for collapsing economies and regimes all around the world.” Referring to Soros’s statements about the devaluation of the dollar, Beck said of Soros, “not only does he want to bring America to her knees, financially, he wants to reap obscene profits off us as well.”
Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, however, criticized another comment. Beck described Soros as a “a Jewish boy sending other Jews to the death camps.” On this Tuesday’s show, which 2.8 million people watched, he also said that the 14-year-old Soros “used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening.
“I am certainly not saying George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice — I mean, he’s 14 years old. He was surviving. So I am not making a judgment, that’s between him and God,” Beck continued.
According to Abraham Foxman, everything that was said is “completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top,” and just “horrific.”
Joel Cheatwood, senior vice president of development at Fox News, partially defended Beck by pointing out that “information regarding Mr. Soros’s experiences growing up were taken directly from his writings and from interviews given by him to the media, and no negative opinion was offered as to his actions as a child.”
Despite Cheatwood’s statement, Foxman continued his critique by stating, “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,” added the director.
Beck has caused controversy with accusations of anti-Semitism in the past, too, but he has also earned the support of some Jewish leaders because of statements like the one made on Tuesday, “I am probably more supportive of Israel and the Jews than George Soros is.”
In October, George Soros donated $1 million to the liberal organization for media monitoring Media Matters. His motives were that he is “supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.”
This week Media Matters won in a charitable auction, with a bid of $86,000, a “friendly” dinner for six with Rupert Murdoch. His News Corp. owns Fox News.
Glenn Beck’s show is unusually popular given the time when it airs — 5 p.m. In the media he is considered one of the most influential voices of populist conservative anger.
A former radio host, Beck moved through the news channel CNN, and only three months after switching to Fox, he already has two million viewers. He was born in 1964 in Mount Vernon, Wash. He is an emotional host, sometimes even crying on air, and offers a mixture of moralizing, anger and apocalyptic visions of the future, which appeal to Americans who feel isolated from decision-making in society.
Beck himself has stated that he identifies with Howard Beale, the hysterical show host from the film Network who made his viewers open their windows and scream, “I’m as mad as hell and I am not taking this anymore!”
Glenn Beck is also an influential figure in the currently very popular movement, the tea party. In August he gathered tens of thousands of Americans at his rally “Restoring Honor” in Washington, D.C. Many of those present in August, as well as participants in other tea party rallies, wore badges advocating Beck’s candidacy for the presidency in 2012 with Sarah Palin.
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