Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

GOP Congressman suggests Charlottesville rally was organized By George Soros

ep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, uggested the events in Charlottesville may have been ‘created by the left’

A Republican congressman from Arizona has claimed that the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August may have been organized by billionaire Jewish financier George Soros.

Rep. Paul Gosar, a dentist who has represented rural western Arizona since 2011, suggested in an interview with Vice News that the events in Charlottesville may have been “created by the left.”

When asked to explain himself, Gosar responded:

Because let’s look at the person that actually started the rally. It’s come to our attention that this is a person from Occupy Wall Street that was an Obama sympathizer. So, wait a minute, be careful where you start taking these people to. And look at the background. You know, you know George Soros is one of those people that actually helps back these individuals. Who is he? I think he’s from Hungary. I think he was Jewish. And I think he turned in his own people to the Nazis. Better be careful where we go with those.

When reporter Elspeth Reeve asked him if he thought Soros funded the neo-Nazi marchers, Gosar responded, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out?”

Soros, who lived in Nazi-occupied Hungary as a child, has long been the subject of debunked conspiracy theories that he collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust, which ended when he was 14.

The Open Society Foundation, Soros’s main charitable foundation, responded by stating, “such baseless allegations are insulting to the victims of the Holocaust, to all Jewish people, and to anyone who honors the truth. It is an affront to Mr. Soros and his family, who against the odds managed to survive one of the darkest moments in our history. He abhors violence in any form and has never funded it. Never has. Never will.”

Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville rally, admitted to voting for President Obama and participating in an Occupy rally, but has also frequently written about his fears of “white genocide.”

Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version