La vérité sur George Soros, ses rapports avec les Juifs et Israël (James Kirchick)

James Kirchick, journaliste américain, chercheur associé à la Brookings Institution, auteur de "The end of Europe" @ Tablet Magazine:

"[…] Soros has also authored 14 portentously titled books, few of which are likely to be remembered. (Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, in a review titled “The Amateur,” panned his 1998 tome The Crisis of Global Capitalism as “embarrassingly banal.”) “Money is just a tool for him,” a friend of Soros told Mayer. “It’s how he manipulates a lot of things in his life.” When Mayer asked Soros “to name one thing in the world that he wished he could have,” he plaintively replied, “I want my ideas to be heard.” It seemed, increasingly, that Soros was suffering from a condition afflicting many obscenely wealthy people: He desperately wanted to be taken seriously as a public intellectual, but did not have anything very profound to say. […]

While Soros has been extremely generous in funding a plethora of organizations and individuals committed to promoting the interests of practically every conceivable identity group, there is one in whose welfare he is utterly disinterested: his own. It is ironic that the left’s new poster child for the evils of right-wing anti-Semitism has what can best be described as an ambivalent relationship to Judaism and the global Jewish community. Soros’ own view of this ambivalence is that it is a mark of universalist superiority over his hidebound, retrograde co-religionists. “I don’t think that you can ever overcome anti-Semitism if you behave as a tribe,” he told The New Yorker in 1995, tacitly blaming other, unassimilated Jews for anti-Jewish bigotry. “The only way you can overcome it is if you give up the tribalness.” Soros has given scant money to Jewish causes; The New Republic in 1994 described an “aversion to financing Jewish organizations” and a “cynical” “view” of organized Jewry, an aversion and a view which seem not to have dissipated over the ensuing decades. As for the Jewish state, Soros believes pro-Israel advocates provoke anti-Semitism. “Attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby’s success in suppressing divergent views,” he has written. Speaking conspicuously in the third person plural, he told Connie Bruck, “I don’t deny the Jews their right to a national existence—but I don’t want to be part of it.”

Fair enough. Yet it’s notable how, among the well over 100 grantees of OSF’s $3 million Communities Against Hate initiative (launched in the aftermath of Trump’s election), there are a preponderance of groups dedicated to defending transgender people and Muslims, and hardly any committed to defending Jews. Soros contributes next to nothing to the fight against anti-Semitism, one he and his defenders claim to care so much about, and in spite of the fact that, according to FBI hate crime statistics, over half of the victims of religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States are Jewish while less than a quarter are Muslim. In New York City, where Soros resides, “there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews—142 in all—as there have against blacks,” writes Ginia Bellafante of The New York Times. And “hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.”

Soros’ son Alexander has expressed a similar contempt for what he portrays as the parochial world of American Jewry, favorably contrasting the deracinated, cosmopolitan philanthropy of his father to the Zionist particularism of other wealthy Jews, as if the two were mutually exclusive. “The reason you fight for an open society is because that’s the only society that you can live in, as a Jew—unless you become a nationalist and only fight for your own rights in your own state,” he dismissively told the Times Magazine last summer. In 2015, the younger Soros started a Jewish political action committee, Bend the Arc. One of the first candidates it endorsed was Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, whose long relationship with Louis Farrakhan has been amply documented. […]"

Lire l'article complet