This morning, Anti-Defamation League Director Abe Foxman called Glenn Beck's accusation that philanthropist George Soros helped “send the Jews” to “death camps” “horrific” and “over the top.”
Discussing his Fox News show, which has been steeped in anti-Semitic rhetoric and outright fabrications smearing Soros, Beck told his radio listeners:
George Soros used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death -- death camps. And I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he's 14 years old. He was surviving. So I'm not making a judgment. That's between him and God. As a 14-year-old boy, I don't know what you would do. I don't know what you would do. But you would think that there would be some remorse as an 80-year-old man or a 40-year-old man or a 20-year-old man, when it was all over, you would do some soul searching and say, 'What did I do? What did I do?'"
Jewish leaders have condemned Beck's smear. According to Jewish Week, Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, said that Beck's statement was “monstrous.” Simon Greer, president of the Jewish Funds for Justice said, “No one who truly understands 'the sensitivity and sacred nature' of the Holocaust would deliberately and grotesquely mis-characterize the experience of a 13 year old Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary whose father hid him with a non-Jewish family to keep him alive.” Rev. Weldon Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, called Beck's statement “beyond repugnant.”
Since the launch of Beck's Fox News program, Sarah Palin has been one of Beck's biggest enablers. In October, Media Matters CEO David Brock joined People for the American Way President Michael Keegan in calling on Sarah Palin to repudiate Beck's use of violence-inciting rhetoric. Palin responded by calling into Beck's radio show and saying, “I stand with you, Glenn.”
Now that Beck has been rebuked by Jewish leaders for his “horrific” attacks, does Sarah Palin still stand with Beck?