How George Soros Has Become The Ultimate (Jewish) Scapegoat For Europe’s Far Right
George Soros became a lightning rod ahead of last November’s presidential election, especially after the Donald Trump campaign ran a commercial linking him to “the global power structure” – a line that many viewed as an anti-Semitic dog whistle.
But as Nick Cohen points out in a recent op-ed for the Guardian, Soros’s appeal as a scapegoat crosses borders, with many in Eastern Europe’s far-right painting him in similarly apocalyptic and problematic terms.
In Hungary, the increasingly authoritarian government of Viktor Orban is attempting to shutter Central European University, a liberal arts school funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundation – an initiative devoted to advancing values of liberal democracy.
In Macedonia, one of the country’s ex-leaders has called for a “de-Sorosisation” of society and threatened street actions to accomplish that goal. Meanwhile, Romania features some politicians claiming that Soros pays demonstrators to air their grievances against the government.
“Listen to the anti-Semitic echoes of the Nazi and communist eras in the vilification of Soros,” he writes. “They are so loud they deafen.”
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com or on Twitter, @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO