Earlier today, Alana wrote about the ad in today’s Wall Street Journal taken out by the left-wing group Jewish Funds for Justice in which the organization called for the News Corporation to “sanction” Glenn Beck of FOX News and to force Roger Ailes, that network’s chief, to apologize for remarks Beck has made relating to the Holocaust. Alana rightly noted the one-sided nature of this group’s advocacy about the Holocaust. Though they clearly want Beck canned for what he has said, they’ve never uttered a word of complaint about the numerous misuses of Holocaust imagery by left-wing figures such as Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee or filmmaker Oliver Stone.
In the body of their ad is a quote from a COMMENTARY Web Exclusive article written by me about Beck’s willingness to raise questions about George Soros’s behavior during the Holocaust. In it I made it clear that while we consider Soros’s political stands abhorrent, his alleged activities as a 14-year-old boy during the Nazi occupation of his native Hungary ought to be out of bounds for his critics. As the Jewish Funds for Justice ad states, the piece said Beck’s attack on Soros on this point was marred by ignorance and innuendo, and I stand by that characterization.
At the time, COMMENTARY’s decision to denounce Beck’s behavior was criticized by some who thought that the TV host’s support for Israel and the fact that his target was a man who was no friend to Israel should have obligated us to be silent about his foolish slurs. They asserted that our willingness to lay out our differences with someone with whom we were otherwise in agreement would be used by left-wing groups who have no such scruples. That prediction has been vindicated by the Jewish Funds for Justice.
The difference between COMMENTARY and the rabbis who speak in the name of the Jewish Funds for Justice couldn’t be clearer. We agree that Holocaust imagery and related topics ought not to be abused for partisan political purposes, though we have to say in passing that Beck’s idiotic attack on Soros is nowhere near as great an offense as Rep. Cohen’s calling his Republican opponents Nazis on the floor of the House of Representatives. But unlike those rabbis, we do not do so only when the offenders are people we disagree with on other issues. Had these rabbis sought to denounce both right-wing and left-wing figures that have called their foes Nazis or made specious comparisons to Adolf Hitler or Joseph Goebbels, they might have done so with some credibility. But since they have invoked their status as spiritual leaders as well as the prestige of the Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements solely to silence a conservative political speaker whom they dislike, they have none.
