There’s much to condemn in George Soros’s recent statements (and actions), but Mark Kleiman is right to fault Tony Blankley for making Soros’s Jewishness part of the condemnation. On the June 3 Hannity & Colmes, Blankley had the following odd statements:
. . . [L]et’s get back to Soros.
This a man who blamed the Jews for anti-Semitism, getting Abe Fluxman (ph) — excuse me — head of the Anti-Defamation League to call it an obscene statement.
This is a man who, when he was plundering the world’s currencies in England in ’92, he caused a Southeastern Asian financial crises in ’97.
[Richard Aborn]: Please, come on. Wait a second. You’re so far beyond the facts. Hold on.
[Blankley]: He said that he has no moral responsibility for the consequences of his financial actions. He is a self-admitted atheist. He was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the holocaust.
What does his being a Jew who managed to survive the Holocaust have to do with things?
I think it’s quite a stretch from this to concluding, as Mark Kleiman does, that this “resolv[es] doubts” “about how much of the [anti-Soros] campaign was based on simple anti-Semitism.” I’m not sure this even tells us how much of Blankley’s anti-Soros views are based on simple anti-Semitism, much less the views of the rest of the campaign.
There’s a simple explanation for why Republicans, especially pro-Administration republicans, dislike Soros and are working to undermine them — he seems to dislike them, and is working to defeat them, using some rather intemperate rhetoric. I have no reason to think that their actions are based, in any significant part, on anti-Semitism.
At the same time, when a person just trots out someone’s Jewishness (or whiteness or blackness) in a context where it seems to make very little sense (the first Blankley reference to his Jewishness does make sense, but the second does not), it does at least suggest that the person is more focused than he should be on who’s a Jew and less on the merits on the debate — and it certainly hints at broader hostility to Jews.
Finally, the line about atheists is pretty reprehensible, too. Just as many Christians rightly condemn anti-Christian insults or anti-religious-Jewish insults, so they should condemn anti-atheist insults.
It is true that there are theoretical arguments about why one shouldn’t trust atheists (they don’t answer to any higher authority) — just as there are theoretical arguments about why one shouldn’t trust devout Christians (they believe things without adequate factual evidence) or devout Catholics (they are governed by the actions of a foreign potentate) or devout Jews (see Christians above if you’re irreligious, plus if you’re a Christian, in theory you should end up agreeing more with Christians than with Jews). But in practice, such generalizations end up being much less reliable than one might think; and they end up being highly destructive of civil debate, and ultimately of society in general, especially when society consists of many religions and denominations.
And that’s just as true of condemnations of people for their atheism as it is of condemnations of people for their Christianity or religious Judaism or Catholicism or Hinduism or whatever else. (This may not extend to all religious beliefs — if a religion in fact requires adherence to some genuinely evil beliefs, then one can rightly infer that adherents of that religion hold those beliefs and are likely to act on them. Satanism, as I’ve heard it described, may be one such example; likewise, if someone belongs to a militant sect that in practice is likely to push its members to engage in holy war against others. But it certainly applies to most mainstream sets of religious belief, including the absence of religious belief, which simply requires as its foundation an understandable skepticism towards the existence of the unproven.)
UPDATE: My colleague Steve Bainbridge explains the story behind Blankley’s first reference to Soros and Jews — “This [is] a man who blamed the Jews for anti-Semitism.” (I didn’t mention it, because I thought that story was fairly well-known; but indeed some people might not know it, so Prof. Bainbridge’s explanation is useful.)
But while that story is the reason I don’t fault Blankley for that first reference (see above), the story does nothing to explain Blankley’s second reference, which is the subject of my criticism.
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