Friday, October 22, 2010

Joseph Klein

George Soros hates being challenged for being the hypocrite, shady financier and self-righteous political patron of the far Left that he really is. So, in the fashion of the dictatorships in which he grew up, Soros does whatever he can to silence the opposition.

In Canada, Soros dispatched his legal team to intimidate my fellow blogger Kathy Shaidle who resides in Canada and posted a blog that apparently offended Soros. In the United States, where Soros cannot as easily exploit libel and defamation laws to his advantage, he spends his money on left-wing outlets like Media Matters to smear his enemies and try to force them off the air. In Canada, Soros dispatched his legal team to intimidate my fellow blogger Kathy Shaidle who resides in Canada and posted a blog that apparently offended Soros. In the United States, where Soros cannot as easily exploit libel and defamation laws to his advantage, he spends his money on left-wing outlets like Media Matters to smear his enemies and try to force them off the air.

In the past, Soros has been careful to keep his fingerprints directly off the Media Matters propaganda machine. He has worked through a network of affiliated organizations which he helps to fund. When confronted with the fact that Soros-funded groups had given donations to help Media Matters get started, Media Matters’ spokeswoman Sally Aman responded to Cybercast News Service’s questions with this weasely e-mail:

In response to your query regarding donor funding Media Matters for America has never received funding directly from George Soros. (Emphasis added)

Now even that statement is no longer true. Soros has come out of the shadows and just announced a $1 million contribution to Media Matters. Glenn Beck and and other Fox News hosts are in his sights for what he calls their “incendiary rhetoric.”

Soros said that he hoped his contribution to Media Matters would be used

in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.

Here is an example of how Media Matters would spend Soros’ money – publishing slanderous garbage seeking to blame Glenn Beck for the acts of any nutty would-be killer who happens to listen to his show.

Less than a week after revelations that conspiracy theories pushed by Glenn Beck and the right-wing media drove a California man to plot the assassination of Tides Foundation employees, Beck devoted an hour-long show to demonizing Tides. Beck’s latest attacks come just hours after Tides released a letter calling on advertisers to stop financing the extremist rhetoric and conspiracy theories broadcast on Fox News.

Tides Foundation CEO and founder Drummond Pike released the aforementioned letter in which he noted that

businesses that pay to broadcast commercials on Fox News are subsidizing Glenn Beck’s television show by continuing to pump money into the network. It has become clear that the only way to stop supporting Beck is to stop supporting Fox News.

I won’t bother repeating here all of the facts about the Tides Foundation and its linkage with Soros that Beck has shared with his audience. But since when is laying out the verifiable facts connecting various individuals and groups, and quoting extremist rhetoric from their own words, somehow “incendiary” as Soros would have us believe? It is “incendiary” only if you are afraid of having your ideas and agenda subjected to what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called the disinfectant of sunlight.

I graduated from Harvard Law School with honors. I have been trained to question critically the assertions by anyone, no matter the source, and to demand credible evidence which I examine myself before reaching any conclusion. I do watch Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News fairly regularly but, like many millions of his audience, certainly do not take anything he says as the given truth. In fact, in repeated statements on his show that Media Matters conveniently leaves out of its Glenn Beck surveillance reports, Beck tells his audience to do their own homework – to check for themselves whether what he saying is factually accurate. And, in repeated statements on his show that Media Matters also conveniently neglects to acknowledge, Beck exhorts his audience to eschew violence of any sort and engage only peacefully in the marketplace of ideas.

For someone who has no problem participating fully in the marketplace of high finance, why won’t Soros accept Beck’s challenge to come on his show and defend his ideas rather than try to suppress those of his opposition?

Joseph A. Klein is the author of a new book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam.

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