“America’s Mayor,” former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is under fire again, this time for suggesting he is “more of a Jew” than leftwing billionaire George Soros.
In a New York Magazine interview (A Conversation With Rudy Giuliani Over Bloody Marys at the Mark Hotel), Giuliani referred to former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch who played a key role in the House impeachment hearings recently, and said she was “controlled” by George Soros.
“He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents,” Rudy insisted.
Soros, whose net worth is $8 billion, after having donated more than $32 billion to his Open Society Foundations, is the proverbial leftist Boogeyman of the right, using his enormous wealth to promote anarchistic causes.
“Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him,” Giuliani said to NY Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi. “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DAs in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.”
Don’t hold back, Rudy, say what you really feel…
NBC, like many other major media outlets pointed out that Giuliani claimed he was more of a Jew than “Holocaust survivor George Soros.” This part requires some unpacking: In 1936, Soros’s family changed their name from Schwartz to Soros, and survived the 1944 Nazi invasion of Hungary by purchasing documents showing they were Christians. George Soros himself posed as the Christian godson of an official of the collaborationist Hungarian government’s Ministry of Agriculture, who himself was married to a Jewish wife.
Back in 2015, Soros told NY Magazine: “I don’t deny the Jews to a right to a national existence – but I don’t want anything to do with it.” According to his 2016 hacked emails, Soros’s Open Society Foundation’s objective is “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies” in international forums, by questioning Israel’s status as a democracy. His funded NGOs campaign for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
In 2016, Soros said that the victims of violence and abuse were becoming “perpetrators of violence,” suggesting this is a representation of Israel’s behavior towards the Palestinians. He was booed by his audience, many of whom walked out.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told The Daily Beast that Giuliani’s comment was “baffling and offensive,” and that the former mayor “is not the arbiter of who is Jewish and who is not, or what is anti-Semitic and what is not.”
Greenblatt defended Soros, saying that “for decades, George Soros’ philanthropy has been used as fodder for outsized anti-Semitic conspiracy theories insisting there exists Jewish control and manipulation of countries and global events. Mr. Giuliani should apologize and retract his comments immediately, unless he seeks to dog whistle to hardcore anti-Semites and white supremacists who believe this garbage.”
The American Jewish Committee issued a statement saying: “No, Mayor, you’re not ‘more of a Jew than Soros.’ You’re entitled to your views and to denouncing his. But it’s offensive to deny anyone’s faith, and worse to endorse classically anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
Giuliani will likely survive this one without having to apologize, because in our brave new world of a down-the-middle split between left and right it doesn’t really matter what the actual content of anyone’s offensive statement may be. Statements are either for us or against us, and we are shocked and enraged by statements against us while callously generating the exact replicas at the other side.
Soros is a product of his assimilated background, which he himself described in a 2016 interview as a “Jewish anti-Semitic home.” That by itself does not make him any worse than other assimilated Jews, and his virulent anti-Israel views should be viewed within this context. Many Jews hate Israel – Soros merely has $32 billion to throw at the enemies of the Jewish State.
Rudy is a friend of Israel, having served as the mayor of the largest Jewish city in the world. But we could do without his hoof in mouth disease which isn’t helping Israel, the Jews, and our troubled ally in the White House.