Replies to post #116498 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[ordinarydude]

That pisses me off.

Benz, want to explain why this wasn't included earlier?

Ordinary

[StephanieVanbryce]

Glenn Beck’s Anti-Semitic Crusade

another take on beck antisemitism

Michael Tolkin November 12, 2010

“Here’s a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps.” - Glenn Beck, November 10

“You’re being duped” by Soros, Tides, ACORN, and PBS - Glenn Beck, October 21

“I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.” - Byron Williams

On July 18, 2010, Byron Williams opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers who had stopped him on an Oakland freeway for driving erratically. For 12 frantic minutes, Williams traded shots with the police, employing three firearms and a small arsenal of ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds fired from a .308-caliber rifle. In an affidavit, an Oakland police investigator reported that during an interview at the hospital, Williams “stated that his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”

If I try to defend George Soros against Glenn Beck’s attack, by dissecting all the ways that Beck is twisting a few pieces of a larger story, I lose. The damage is done. The particulars of Soros’ childhood experience are irrelevant. His real crime, for Beck and the right wing, is that among the billionaires, he seems to be the only one to spend money on left wing causes the way right wing billionaires have been spending on theirs. Not every billionaire is fascist, and if more of them followed Soros’ example, the left might have the kind of intellectual army sent to the field by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, with cadres of pundits trained in the daily talking points, and given extra cash by speaking at seminars.

The psychotic confusion of Beck’s punditoracy…. Did you think it wouldn’t end with Jew hatred? All conspiracy theory has to end blaming us, the Jews. All political lies converge on us. Political lies on the left converge on us, too, but anyone who wants to give Beck a pass and make this an example of how both sides are guilty, is guilty of Jew hatred.

Why are vampires and zombies the metaphors of the age? Because no other metaphors better describe the world in which we live. The vampires are the seducers who bring the herd to violence, and make the herd their slaves. Glenn Beck is a vampire, Byron Williams was his zombie. Anyone who exuses Glenn Beck after this latest rant is either a vampire or a zombie.

There is no reasoning possible with them anymore, and the ballot is the only stake you can drive through their heart. Violence can’t work against them because the provocation gives them everything they want, the excuse to suspend what remains of liberty, in the name of liberty

Again, the only resistance is the ballot, thus, their attack on voters and voter registration and their history of voter suppression and the reason why the conservatives on the Supreme Court have given corporations the power to fund unlimited cash into election campaign.

So, the TIDES foundation is targeted by Beck, because, as TIDES states, “Our mission is to partner with philanthropists, foundations, activists, and organizations across the country and across the globe to promote economic justice, robust democratic processes, and the opportunity to live in a healthy and sustainable environment where human rights are preserved and protected.”

What Beck fears most, more than the truth, more than being called an anti-semite, is high voter turnout.

Soros gave money to the Prop 19 campaign not to legalize pot as much as to get out younger voters, hoping that this would defeat the Republicans.

The incoherence of the right wing is the product of careful study, the product of the right wing think tanks. There is no coherent argument against Beck or Limbaugh or Palin, because under - I was about to say fascist, but that’s not accurate anymore, call them what they call themselves, Tea Partiers – under Tea Party thinking, language can’t hold thought anymore. It’s easy to refute Beck point by point, but impossible to stop him, because the arguments we make against him have to be carefully researched and organized, and organized thoughts are to the Tea Party mind like organized labor; the enemy.

Beck, Murdoch, the Kochs, Limbaugh, Ailes… their wet dreams don’t allow them fantasies of death camps, but something more like Chile under Pinochet or Argentina under the generals. We’ve already sanctioned torture, and the enhanced interrogators have been trained and are surely willing, if not waiting.

Do you remember Jacobo Timerman? He was an Argentine journalist who was tortured in a secret prison for two and a half years starting in 1977, in the years when the Argentine military killed thirty thousand people. He was then released on condition that he leave for Israel. In 1981 he published “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,” his memoirs of that time. For attacking Ronald Reagan’s support for the Argentine regime, his credibility was attacked by William F. Buckley, of course, but also Irving Kristol, because the Argentines were anti-communist.

I bring this up, because even as death squads knock on American doors, taking away Jewish opponents, there will be right wing Jews who say it isn’t true.

Then, ten, fifteen years from now, there’ll be some dreadfully sentimental reconciliation ceremonies on national television, hosted by Jon Stewart, in which prisoners and torturers will be given new cars in celebration of the government imposed civility.

On Halloween, I went out in the neighborhood on a get out the vote drive with the Progressive Jewish Alliance. I was dressed as someone who gets the out vote, no mask. I’m safe, for now. But just for now.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/glenn_beck/article/glenn_becks_anti-semitic_crusade_20101112/

[F6]

Glenn Beck Sees George Soros as Iran Does


A frame from an animated film produced by Iran’s intelligence ministry in 2008 imagined George Soros, who has supported democracy in autocratic countries, plotting coups against the Islamic regime from the White House.
MEMRI

By ROBERT MACKEY
November 12, 2010, 2:55 pm

As my colleague Brian Stelter reports [ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/us/12beck.html ], the Fox News host Glenn Beck [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/glenn_beck/index.html ] was accused this week of deploying “a symphony of anti-Semitic dog whistles [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-10/glenn-becks-anti-semitic-attack-on-george-soros/ ]” in his lengthy attack on the political activities of George Soros [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/george_soros/index.html ], a billionaire investor and philanthropist Mr. Beck repeatedly described as a “puppet master” who “collapses regimes.”

While Mr. Beck has cited his strong support for the state of Israel to fend off that criticism, perhaps the oddest part of his critique of Mr. Soros is that the Fox host appeared to agree with the autocratic leaders of countries like Iran and Myanmar, who see something sinister in the philanthropist’s promotion of democracy [ http://www.soros.org/ ].

In his indictment of Mr. Soros this week, what Mr. Beck did not say about the list of governments he claimed the philanthropist had helped to topple was striking. Before naming America as Mr. Soros’s next “target,” Mr. Beck ominously intoned:

Soros has helped fund the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in the Czech Republic, the “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine, the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia and Yugoslavia.

[embedded video]
An excerpt from Glenn Beck’s program about George Soros posted online by Media Matters for America [at http://mediamatters.org/blog/201011090050 ], a watchdog group Mr. Soros recently decided to support [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/onmedia/1010/Soros_gives_1_million_to_Media_Matters.html ].

What Mr. Beck failed to mention is that in each of the countries he named, Mr. Soros in fact provided support to popular pro-democracy groups battling repressive regimes led by Communist or former Communist autocrats. The Fox host also seemed confused about some of the events he described in those nations.

To start with, the mass street protests led by the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel in 1989 that brought down Prague’s Communist regime took place in what was still Czechoslovakia, not the Czech Republic, which did not exist at the time.

There were also no coups in Slovakia, Croatia or Yugoslavia. Slovakia was created by the so-called “velvet divorce [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/business/global/04slovakia.html ],” the peaceful dissolution of the federal state of Czechoslovakia by democratically-elected leaders in 1993; Croatia’s wartime president, Franjo Tudjman, an authoritarian former Communist general, died in office [ http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/11/world/tudjman-is-dead-croat-led-country-out-of-yugoslavia.html ] in 1999 and was replaced by a former member of his party after a democratic election; Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader who was most responsible for the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed tens of thousands in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, resigned in 2000 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/07/world/showdown-yugoslavia-overview-milosevic-concedes-his-defeat-yugoslavs-celebrate.html ], following street protests after his loss in a democratic election.

Mr. Beck’s suggestion that these peaceful ends to tyrannical regimes would not have come about without money from foreign plotters ignores strong evidence to the contrary, which suggests that in each case civil society groups, with some moral and financial support from the outside world, led popular uprisings against unpopular authoritarian rulers.

The Fox News host also made no mention in his program of the fact — first reported by Justin Elliott [ http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/11/12/orion_soros_palin/index.html ] of Salon on Friday — that Mr. Soros has paid more than $150,000 to Randy Scheunemann, a Republican lobbyist who is a senior adviser to Sarah Palin, to press Congress and the White House to keep sanctions in place against Myanmar’s military junta and promote a resolution “calling for the immediate and unconditional release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” whose party won the last free elections held in the country. (Laura Silber, a spokeswoman for Mr. Soros’s Open Society Institute [ http://www.soros.org/ ], confirmed to The Lede that he had hired Mr. Scheunemann’s firm to lobby in support of democracy in Myanmar.)

In 2008, while he was an adviser to Senator John McCain, Mr. Scheunemann’s lobbying firm also signed a $200,000 contract [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/12/AR2008081202932.html ] to work for the government of Georgia, which is still run by President Mikheil Saakashvili, who came to power in the Rose Revolution that was on Mr. Beck’s list of sinister regime changes.

Oddly, Mr. Beck’s conspiratorial reading of the recent history of Eastern Europe puts him in complete agreement with Iran’s intelligence ministry, which for years has been working to discredit the country’s reformist leaders and their calls for fair elections as the puppets of foreign plotters.

Mr. Soros’s name was invoked repeatedly [ http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/104467.html ] during the show trials of opposition figures in Tehran in 2009, following weeks of street protests over the country’s disputed presidential election. At his trial, an Iranian academic who once received support from Mr. Soros, Kian Tajbakhsh, claimed [ http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/104471.html ], in what appeared to be a forced confession, that the country’s former president, Mohammad Khatami, had met with Mr. Soros to plot the overthrow of Iran’s Islamic Republic.

Mr. Khatami called the allegation absurd, but, as The Lede explained in a post on “Iran’s Fear of a ‘Velvet Revolution,’ [ http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/irans-fear-of-a-velvet-revolution/ ]” Iran’s intelligence service seems to be obsessed with Mr. Soros. In an animated television program produced by the ministry for Iranian television in 2008, Mr. Soros was imagined conspiring in the White House with Senator McCain, the C.I.A. and Gene Sharp, a proponent of civil disobedience, plotting to overthrow Iran’s government with the help of Iranian reformists.

A public service announcement made by Iran’s intelligence ministry in 2008, which began with an animated film imagining plotters scheming against Iran in the White House. [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kizkljTDR_Q&f (embedded)]

Despite attacks from Mr. Beck and Iran’s government, Mr. Soros seems quite proud of his role in promoting democratic change in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe. The Open Society Institute spokeswoman, Ms. Silber, told The Lede that Mr. Soros did provide financial support to both the Czech pro-democracy group Charter 77 and Poland’s Solidarity movement, which eventually brought democracy to that country too, in the early 1980s. During the same period, Mr. Soros also, “set up foundations in Communist Hungary and the Soviet Union that worked to undermine the repressive regimes there,” Ms. Silber added.

Last year Mr. Soros himself explained [ http://articles.cnn.com/2009-07-27/world/aoc.soros.opensociety_1_foundation-s-board-hungary-machines?_s=PM:WORLD ], in an article on his work published on CNN’s Web site, what his aim was:

I set up my first foundation in Hungary in 1984. The idea behind it was simple. The state dogma, promoted by the ruling communists, was false and by providing an alternative we could expose its falsehood. Accordingly we supported every cultural initiative that was not an expression of the established dogma.

I was guided by the concept of the “open society,” which I adopted from the philosopher Karl Popper. I saw the open society as a more sophisticated form of social organization than the totalitarian closed societies of the Soviet bloc.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/glenn-beck-sees-george-soros-as-iran-does/ [with comments]

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Another repressive regime that despises Soros as much as Beck does: Burma
November 12, 2010
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201011120054 [with comments]

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