MEMRI

As my colleague Brian Stelter reports, the Fox News host Glenn Beck was accused this week of deploying “a symphony of anti-Semitic dog whistles” in his lengthy attack on the political activities of George Soros, a billionaire investor and philanthropist Mr. Beck repeatedly described as a “puppet master” who “collapses regimes.”

While Mr. Beck has cited his strong support for the state of Israel to fend off that criticism, perhaps the oddest part of his critique of Mr. Soros is that the Fox host appeared to agree with the autocratic leaders of countries like Iran and Myanmar, who see something sinister in the philanthropist’s promotion of democracy.

In his indictment of Mr. Soros this week, what Mr. Beck did not say about the list of governments he claimed the philanthropist had helped to topple was striking. Before naming America as Mr. Soros’s next “target,” Mr. Beck ominously intoned:

Soros has helped fund the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in the Czech Republic, the “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine, the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia and Yugoslavia.





What Mr. Beck failed to mention is that in each of the countries he named, Mr. Soros in fact provided support to popular pro-democracy groups battling repressive regimes led by Communist or former Communist autocrats. The Fox host also seemed confused about some of the events he described in those nations.

To start with, the mass street protests led by the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel in 1989 that brought down Prague’s Communist regime took place in what was still Czechoslovakia, not the Czech Republic, which did not exist at the time.

There were also no coups in Slovakia, Croatia or Yugoslavia. Slovakia was created by the so-called “velvet divorce,” the peaceful dissolution of the federal state of Czechoslovakia by democratically-elected leaders in 1993; Croatia’s wartime president, Franjo Tudjman, an authoritarian former Communist general, died in office in 1999 and was replaced by a former member of his party after a democratic election; Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader who was most responsible for the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed tens of thousands in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, resigned in 2000, following street protests after his loss in a democratic election.

Mr. Beck’s suggestion that these peaceful ends to tyrannical regimes would not have come about without money from foreign plotters ignores strong evidence to the contrary, which suggests that in each case civil society groups, with some moral and financial support from the outside world, led popular uprisings against unpopular authoritarian rulers.

The Fox News host also made no mention in his program of the fact — first reported by Justin Elliott of Salon on Friday — that Mr. Soros has paid more than $150,000 to Randy Scheunemann, a Republican lobbyist who is a senior adviser to Sarah Palin, to press Congress and the White House to keep sanctions in place against Myanmar’s military junta and promote a resolution “calling for the immediate and unconditional release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,” whose party won the last free elections held in the country. (Laura Silber, a spokeswoman for Mr. Soros’s Open Society Institute, confirmed to The Lede that he had hired Mr. Scheunemann’s firm to lobby in support of democracy in Myanmar.)

In 2008, while he was an adviser to Senator John McCain, Mr. Scheunemann’s lobbying firm also signed a $200,000 contract to work for the government of Georgia, which is still run by President Mikheil Saakashvili, who came to power in the Rose Revolution that was on Mr. Beck’s list of sinister regime changes.

Oddly, Mr. Beck’s conspiratorial reading of the recent history of Eastern Europe puts him in complete agreement with Iran’s intelligence ministry, which for years has been working to discredit the country’s reformist leaders and their calls for fair elections as the puppets of foreign plotters.

Mr. Soros’s name was invoked repeatedly during the show trials of opposition figures in Tehran in 2009, following weeks of street protests over the country’s disputed presidential election. At his trial, an Iranian academic who once received support from Mr. Soros, Kian Tajbakhsh, claimed, in what appeared to be a forced confession, that the country’s former president, Mohammad Khatami, had met with Mr. Soros to plot the overthrow of Iran’s Islamic Republic.

Mr. Khatami called the allegation absurd, but, as The Lede explained in a post on “Iran’s Fear of a ‘Velvet Revolution,'” Iran’s intelligence service seems to be obsessed with Mr. Soros. In an animated television program produced by the ministry for Iranian television in 2008, Mr. Soros was imagined conspiring in the White House with Senator McCain, the C.I.A. and Gene Sharp, a proponent of civil disobedience, plotting to overthrow Iran’s government with the help of Iranian reformists.





Despite attacks from Mr. Beck and Iran’s government, Mr. Soros seems quite proud of his role in promoting democratic change in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe. The Open Society Institute spokeswoman, Ms. Silber, told The Lede that Mr. Soros did provide financial support to both the Czech pro-democracy group Charter 77 and Poland’s Solidarity movement, which eventually brought democracy to that country too, in the early 1980s. During the same period, Mr. Soros also, “set up foundations in Communist Hungary and the Soviet Union that worked to undermine the repressive regimes there,” Ms. Silber added.

Last year Mr. Soros himself explained, in an article on his work published on CNN’s Web site, what his aim was: