George Soros, a fairy tale. By Arthur J. Finkelstein and George Eli Birnbaum - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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German original, of the swiss "Basler Zeitung", Jan 12, 2019, can be found here: https://m.bazonline.ch/articles/20981022

I cant find any english original, so it had to be translated. For that I used Google's Babelfish. Sorry, such a wall of text would take me more than a day to translate by hand.



The evil jew

Arthur J. Finkelstein invented the perfidious campaign against George Soros. His closest associate tells for the first time how he went about it.

He is the antichrist. The most dangerous person in the world. An old rich man, a speculator who caused the collapse of the British pound in 1992, the Asian crisis of 1997, the 2008 financial crisis. He first destroyed the Soviet Union and then Yugoslavia to clear the way for Africans and Arabs to expel Europeans. He sponsors left-wing extremists, wants to overthrow the president of the United States and lives from drug trafficking and financial crime. Incidentally, he finances euthanasia, censorship and terrorism. Even as a child he delivered Jews to the Nazis, although he is a Jew himself.

You can find out about it on Facebook, Youtube or Twitter by typing «Soros». George Soros is a Jew, that's right, everything else is wrong, invented and put into the world in the course of one of the most perfidious and powerful political campaigns of all time.

Just a few years ago, George Soros was a billionaire whose profound criticism of capitalism was valued even at the World Economic Forum in Davos. A currency trader who once belonged to the thirtieth richest people in the world, but then bequeathed most of his billion-dollar assets to his foundation. His Open Society Foundations are the third largest charitable foundation in the world, directly behind the Gates Foundation. While Bill Gates tries to alleviate the pain of the world, for example to eradicate malaria, Soros wants to improve the world, for example through educational projects or seed capital for migrants. He wants to realize the ideal that his philosopher Karl Popper once said as a counterpart to totalitarianism: the open society.

An office on the 38th floor of an edgy glass tower in New York. Sitting there, Michael Vachon, Soros' personal advisor, shatters his head. How did his boss turn into a world-wide respected philanthropist and become one of the most hated people in the world? In 2017 Vachon started the so-called sentiment analysis to measure how big the problem really is. An orange curve on his calculator shows the extent. It replicates the reactions in the network in the name of Soros: tens of thousands of responses per week, in some weeks almost one hundred percent of them are negative. The graph is a fever curve of hatred.

Two people know the answer to Vachon's question. One is dead, the other stands on a sunny June morning in 2018 on the sprawling buffet of the Westin Grand Hotel in Berlin. A man with a figure of a marathon runner, slim and tall, his skull and face shaved immaculately, his horn-rimmed glasses are framed by his piercing blue eyes. George Eli Birnbaum was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, named after Birnbaum, he became his grandfather. The Nazis had shot him, in the eyes of his son, who narrowly escaped the Holocaust and fled to the States.

But as far as Atlanta, where the young George grew up, the family pursued anti-Semitism. Again and again his Jewish private school was sprayed with anti-Semitic slogans. That shaped. Each weekend, his father gave him the Jerusalem Post. "First you worry about how the Jews are doing, then you worry about the rest of the world," he said. George Birnbaum's conviction grew that only a strong state of Israel could protect the Jews from a new holocaust.

It's hard for him to talk about it, and it's the first time he's spoken to a journalist about it. But this George Birnbaum has contributed decisively to the fact that the new rights are strengthened worldwide and anti-Semitism could again become a political weapon. By pillorying a Jew: George Soros.


The candidate

It all began 23 years ago with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. On November 4, 1995, the greatest hope for peace that Israel ever had bled to death. After the assassination fresh elections were hastily arranged. The candidates: Shimon Peres, a founding generation social democrat who wanted to continue Rabin's peace process, and Benjamin Netanyahu, a business consultant, a freshman, a rightist. Many ridiculed Netanyahu's ambitions. In surveys, he was over twenty percent behind Peres.

Suddenly, however, Netanyahu's Likud party bombarded the country with grim election spots: "Peres will divide Jerusalem," was the slogan. This unsettled many voters. The sentence was a mere statement that Shimon Peres had no such plans. On election day, the race between Peres and Netanyahu was extremely close. At about 10 pm, according to the first projections, the television stations announce a wafer-thin victory for Peres. Netanyahu then calls for the phone and calls "Arthur" - his secret campaign leader. Arthur Finkelstein is in New York, but immediately on the phone. Netanyahu should not worry, he says. "I always win the tight elections."

"Arthur Finkelstein was a genius," says Birnbaum. Finkelstein was a number person, a so-called pollster. These are policy consultants who develop tactics and strategies based on surveys - polls - for their customers. Pollster try to recognize opinions, moods, common or divisive in the population, so that their customer can use that for themselves.

Sometimes pollster campaigns develop. In Israel, Finkelstein even developed a candidate: Benjamin Netanyahu, who took on Shimon Peres in May 1996, was his creation. "Everything Bibi did during the election campaign was determined by Arthur," write Netanyahu's biographers Ben Kaspit and Ilan Kfir.

Finkelstein was a discreet person. Only two speeches from him can be found on the net. No one ever got it completely, not even its customers. He flew in, gave advice and disappeared. He was never present on Election Day. Locally, his people worked, Arthur's kids, as they called themselves. Information about Finkelstein must be gathered together, there are hints in the Israeli and Hungarian press, he is mentioned in files, gaps supplemented discussions with over a dozen insiders and not least with George Birnbaum itself.

Finkelstein is the common thread in the recent history of the Republicans, from Ayn Rand to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. In college, he met Rand, the mother of the libertarian movement. Later he helped the legendary Barry Goldwater, who reinvented the Republicans from the right in the mid-1960s. Finkelstein survived the Watergate scandal, was involved in Ronald Reagan's electoral victory in 1980, worked for George Bush senior and also for an entrepreneur named Donald Trump.

To this he predicted a political career. Trump's campaign team was also influenced by Arthur's kids: Larry Weitzner, Tony Fabrizio and his old friend Roger Stone. Richard Grenell, US Ambassador to Berlin, was also related to Finkelstein, as was David B. Cornstein, US Ambassador to Hungary.

The connection between Finkelstein and modern republican communication can also be summed up in a nutshell: In his time as a central campaign member of Ronald Reagan, he advertised that strangely dark, deep-rooted slogan that everyone knows today: Let's make America great again.



Fear fuel

Finkelstein followed a formula that he continued to develop: negative campaigning. This campaigning technique is about attacking your opponent's campaign instead of promoting your own program. Finkelstein's starting point: Every election is decided before the election. Most people know from the beginning who they want to vote for or against what they are. And it's incredibly hard to convince them otherwise.

It is much easier to demotivate people than to motivate them. So you can teach the opponent decisive vocal losses. Today one calls the voter suppression, voter suppression. Brad Parscale, head of Trump's Digital Campaign, described it as one of the key tools of the 2016 election. The method reads like the how-to of modern right-wing populism.

Finkelstein, originally a programmer in the finance industry, raised as pollster population data such as age, place of residence, preferred candidate, political stance, number of church visits. His talent was to recognize patterns. For example: What are the "middle topics", the ones that interest most people? Which ones hurt the most? In fact, he soon realized, they are often the same: "Drugs, crime and skin color." That's cutting, he wrote in a 1972 memo to Richard Nixon. Finkelstein's goal was to polarize the electorate maximum. To heat up against each other. The fuel: fear. "It must be done as if the danger came from the left," he advised Nixon. He must set the issues that the population is afraid of.

In general, attack is mandatory. Those who do not strike first will be beaten by the other. And Finkelstein personalized. Every campaign needs an enemy that needs to be defeated. The negative campaigning he further developed into a technique he called rejectionist voting. The idea is not to talk about the advantages of one's own candidate, but to project everything bad on the competitor in order to destroy the trust of its voters. He took no account of sensitivities. He did his job as a lawyer defends a murderer.

In the last step, Finkelstein used this method to set the trap for the opponent: he made a statement in the world and counted on the opponent's involvement in trying to disprove it. As soon as the opponent reacts to the accusation, he associates with it. But if he ignores her, he leaves her unchallenged. At best, the claim itself is already so strange or shocking that media multiply it.

Finkelstein became famous for turning the term "liberal" into a dirty word. He called opponents "ultraliberal", "insanely liberal" or "shamefully liberal". Mark Mellman, Democrat campaign guru, calls the Finkel-Think: "To brand someone as liberals, insult them endlessly." The method was simple but effective, presumably no one brought more politicians to the US Congress than Finkelstein.



To Europe

In Israel Finkelstein pulls the recipe through completely in 1996: He shoots Peres from all channels. His short, hard-hitting slogans are in all media. In the final talk show Peres falls into the trap: He wants to make it crystal clear that he does not plan to divide Jerusalem. Netanyahu has the discussion in hand. As Peres wakes up the day after the election, Netanyahu is prime minister. 50.5 to 49.5 percent.

Finkelstein had been given the Israel job by his friend and customer Ron Lauder, the billionaire heir to the cosmetics empire and then Netanyahu financier. Initially it was a part time job. Actually Finkelstein worked on the campaign against the re-election of Bill Clinton.

In Israel, Finkelstein discovers that his formula works elsewhere. Since Netanyahu's victory, all parties have opted for negative campaigns. Finkelstein is in demand. He is behind Sharon's surprise success in 2001, followed later by Avigdor Lieberman, a customer even further to the right. The triumphs in Israel mark the beginning of a new phase: Finkelstein turns to Europe. To this end, he begins his collaboration with George Eli Birnbaum, the man with the figure of a marathon runner. The two form a team that will later create Finkelstein's enduring legacy - his monster.

Birnbaum is one of Arthur's kids. He got to know the secret star of the Republicans in Washington in the mid-1990s, says Birnbaum. At that time, the young man Finkelstein every morning stacks polls. "Everything Arthur did was based on numbers," recalls Birnbaum, "but no one could read from the numbers what Arthur read."

Outwardly Finkelstein was the Enigma, the strategist who works for the Right. But Birnbaum soon got to know the private Arthur. A friendly, witty, brilliant and yet unpretentious man, full of anecdotes from the innermost circles of power. The scion of a Jewish family from Queens, who joked about kosher rules. A nerd, the chest pocket of his button-down shirt always crammed with pens and notepads to record every intuition.

In the stiff politics world, Arthur always relaxed the tie and walked in socks through the office. He could afford anything, because he was the right brain half of the right. Once, Finkelstein told a staff member, Reagan's chief of staff thanked him in writing for having mostly kept the shoes in the Oval Office this time. His passion was election campaigns. They reminded him, he told students in Prague, about a sandy beach that at first glance always looks the same but is constantly changing. There comes a wave or a storm, and everything is different. His love was for his two daughters - and his husband. Arthur Finkelstein, who helped radical Republican gay haters, was a homosexual. Donald was the love of his life.



Captain and helmsman

When Finkelstein asked Birnbaum in 1998 if he wanted to work for Likud in Israel, a dream came true for him. Even if Netanyahu's re-election subsequently fails, the two become a team. Finkelstein is the captain, pear tree the helmsman. While Finkelstein commutes between New York and Israel, Birnbaum holds the position in Israel, where he soon acts as office manager for Netanyahu, organized his performances, representing him in front of the press and occasionally kept his children.

In 2006, Birnbaum founds GEB International - with Finkelstein as partner. Together they want to roll up Eastern Europe. Birnbaum looks for customers, sells Finkelstein's formula. In Romania they help Calin Popescu-Tariceanu to power, in Bulgaria Sergei Stanishev.

In 2008, a man in Hungary wants to return to power. His name is Viktor Orbán and he is the former prime minister. He will be helped by his old friend «Bibi» - Benjamin Netanyahu. The two share a longstanding friendship that is so close that some call it "Bromance". In fact, their greatest commonality is the work of Finkelstein and Birnbaum. According to the Haaretz newspaper, Netanyahu sent his two campaigners to Orbán. It all started in 2008, remembers Birnbaum, and immediately won a referendum that placed Orbán and his conservative Fidesz movement in the 2010 elections.

If one wants to understand Finkelstein as an artist, he created his masterpiece in Hungary, together with Birnbaum. They were initially hired in Hungary for a year, says Birnbaum. Officially for the Fidesz-near Századvég Foundation. For the 2010 election, Finkelstein's recipe for success was to focus on the weaknesses of his opponents - and to keep his own candidate out of the limelight. The opponent, the ruling Social Democrats, was overrun with attacks. Even today, Birnbaum is amazed at how easy it was: "In 2010 we blew the Social Democrats off the table before the election."

New opponents are quickly found: Hungary suffers from the financial crisis and must be rescued by a cash injection. This in turn leads to austerity measures by lenders - World Bank, EU and International Monetary Fund. So the Americans recommend Orbán to define "the bureaucrats" and the foreign "big capital" as an enemy. It is followed by a massive shift to the right in favor of Fidesz, Orbán wins the election by a two-thirds majority.

Birnbaum and Finkelstein, who henceforth belonged to Orbán's closest circle, now had a problem. While the satisfied election winner set about rewriting the constitution, Finkelstein and Birnbaum again lacked an opponent.

"There was no opposition," says Birnbaum. The ultra-right Jobbik party and the Social Democrats were beaten off, the rest just splinter groups. "We had an incumbent with a historic majority, something that had never happened in Hungary before." To get that, they needed a "high energy level." "You have to keep the base powered up. Give her the reason to go out on the next election day. "They needed something powerful, like Trump's" Build the Wall! "Today.





The perfect opponent

Finkelstein's formula demands that every successful campaign needs an opponent. "The best way to bring the troops together," explains Birnbaum. Arthur always said that it was not against the Nazis but against Hitler; not against al Qaeda, but against Osama bin Laden. "Only: Who could now become this opponent in Hungary? Where was the fire-breathing dragon that Orbán had to fight with the help of the people?

Viktor Orbán was creating an alternative, more dramatic narrative of his nation. A driving force is historian Mária Schmidt, a friend of Orbán, whom he made during his first reign in 2002 as head of the National Memorial for Victims of the Dictatorships. A combative woman who has also inherited a lot of money. She portrays Hungary, which had pacted with Hitler, as an innocent victim, surrounded by enemies, who staunchly and valiantly maintained their very own identity. For them, Hungary is a nation in eternal siege. First the Ottomans, then the Nazis, then the Communists. Hungary's mission: warding off external influences and defending Christianity.

Against this background Arthur Finkelstein has an inspiration. It's a campaign idea, so big and so mephistophelic that it will outlive itself.

Essentially, it is about the continuation of the story of the foreign "big capital" that has conspired against little Hungary. But with a dramatic increase: what if suddenly the curtain lifts before the conspiracy of capital and a figure emerges that holds everything in his hands. Someone who not only controls "big capital" but embodies it? A real person. In addition, a native of Hungary. Foreign and yet known. This person is George Soros, says Finkelstein. And Birnbaum immediately recognized the genius of the idea: "Soros was the perfect opponent."

At this moment the monster George Soros is born. A multi-billionaire, so powerful and networked worldwide, that the whole nation would have to gather behind Orbán to defeat him. Here in Hungary, the hatred figure will be created, which will soon be picked up by politicians from all over the world. Into the German Bundestag or the Bundeshaus in Bern.

For the time being, Finkelstein's proposal is abstruse. An election campaign against a non-politician. A man who does not even live in Hungary. An old man known throughout the country as a patron and helper. He supported the opposition against the communists before the turnaround, then donated school meals to children, later built one of the best universities in Eastern Europe in the middle of Budapest.

Even Orbán had once received money from Soros: In his opposition, his small underground foundation Századvég published critical journals, created on a copy machine paid for by Soros. Orbán was also one of over 15,000 Open Society Foundations scholars. Only thanks to Soros could Orbán study philosophy at Oxford. The two met only once: when Soros came to Hungary in 2010 after a flood disaster to provide a million dollar emergency aid.

There was really no reason to be against him.



A means to an end

But Finkelstein and Pearwood saw something completely different in George Soros. There is a long history of criticism of Soros. It dates back to 1992, when Soros earned a billion dollars overnight with a currency deal - claiming to have driven British citizens into poverty. For many leftists, Soros was a grasshopper. Until he used his sudden notoriety to make surprisingly left-liberal ideas public. He was for everything the right was: climate protection, redistribution, the Clintons. He opposed the Second Iraq War in 2003, compared George W. Bush with the Nazis, began to become a major donor of the Democrats. So he made himself the enemy of the Republicans.

But there was more. Finkelstein and Birnbaum had expanded into exactly those countries where the open-society foundations had intensively tried to build up liberal local elites and civil rights movements: Ukraine, Romania, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Albania. Birnbaum, the silent right, rejects Soros. He thinks that Soros stands for "a socialism that is wrong for these regions". Finkelstein, however, says Birnbaum, saw this as "completely rational": Soros as an adversary was only a means to an end.

To find out if the name George Soros is really well-known in Hungary, he was tested in telephone surveys along with a number of other potential adversary names, such as one person involved in these polls. Birnbaum himself does not want to confirm the polling in the case of Soros.

Now Orbán had to be convinced. Birnbaum says Finkelstein enjoyed "enormous confidence" in Orbán. Orbán's speakers have refused to comment on this. "No one was more important to Orbán's politics than Finkelstein," says a former Hungarian Fidesz pollster. "And never did Finkelstein have a better student."

For Orbán, the anti-Soros campaign made sense both externally and domestically. In foreign policy, she would like the Russian neighbor. Putin feared so-called color revolutions as in the Arab Spring or the Ukraine and had begun to take action against Soros and its promotion of liberal forces. A common enemy connects. Domestically, the campaign fit Mária Schmidt, who was convinced that Soros was behind the criticism of the US Democrats on their revisionist homeland tale. She has seen it in the comedy show "Saturday Night Live," Schmidt recently told an American journalist in all seriousness. In 2008, a Soros actor appeared, dubbed "George Soros, owner of the Democratic Party". And Soros never contradicted that. Thus, the case for Schmidt was clear.



The first shot

The fact that Finkelstein and Birnbaum worked for Orbán has been repeatedly discussed. In Hungary Finkelstein is almost a mythical figure. Orbán, however, has never said clearly about his role, his spokesman refuse to answer an answer. Birnbaum is the first party to talk about it with the magazine. Nevertheless, he leaves many questions unanswered. So he does not want to remember the details of the collaboration, whether they were also slogans or just guiding ideas, how far you controlled the campaign itself.

However, everyone could see what happened in Hungary in the years that followed. And what followed from it worldwide. Actually, the campaign only had to bring together all the arguments and measures against Soros from East and West, left and right. New was simply that you made Soros election campaign opponents.

The first shot will take place on August 14, 2013, almost nine months before the next election. An article in the pro-government newspaper Heti Valasz allegedly attacks Soros-run NGOs. For the first time, the picture of a plot orchestrated by Soros against Hungary is drawn in public. Next comes a fight by the Hungarian state apparatus against the allegedly controlled by Soros environmental organization Ökotárs, which received not only Norwegian but also Swiss development funds of the SDC. Police storm the offices of alleged Soros lackeys, confiscate computers. Month-long processes and investigations against Ökotárs are initiated. Swiss funds are blocked. Even if the Hungarian investigators do not find anything at the end, the picture of the dangerously intertwined NGO cliques has been constructed.

In this time fall the Syria war and the enormous increase help-seeking people in the EU, the so-called refugee crisis. While Finkelstein designs a campaign against refugees at an early age, Soros publishes an essay in autumn 2015 in which he calls for a "joint EU plan" in dealing with the refugees. He says the EU must "prepare for one million refugees a year in the foreseeable future". A found food for Orbán.

Just days after the Hungarian government has to give up the battle against Ökotárs, Viktor Orbán gives a speech. He says that George Soros is "the representative" of that Western thought that "weakened the nation state" and wanted to flood it with refugees. For the first time Soros' help for migrants emerges as part of a big conspiracy.

From the end of 2015, the attacks will follow in ever shorter intervals. Any organization that has ever received money from the Open Society Foundations is portrayed as "controlled by Soros." Employees of the NGOs are ultimately referred to as foreign-funded "mercenaries".

All of this is done through a sophisticated ping-pong of sensational "revelatory" articles and official "reactions" from government officials. The smear campaign is becoming more and more unrestrained: Hungary copies Putin's move to withdraw a license from a University co-financed by Soros in Petersburg. In February 2017, the attacks against Soros' Central European University, which is headed by the Canadian Michael Ignatieff. The respected historian was once in his homeland as a politician against the Conservative Party started - worked for the Finkelstein.




Epitome of evil

The tentative climax of the campaign against Soros is reached in July 2017, when the country is plastered with posters showing its face, including the sentence: "Do not let Soros laugh last!" The slogan "Stop Soros" is constantly being repeated Photomontages show Soros arm in arm with alleged allies crossing a cut fence: Orbán's border fence against refugees. Orbán claims that Soros has a mafia network. In autumn 2017, the government will conduct a "national consultation". Questionnaires are sent to millions of citizens. You can mark whether or not they support the "Soros Plan" of settling one million people from Africa or the Middle East every year in Europe.

Around 3.6 million dollars were spent by the open-society foundations in Hungary in 2016. The anti-Soros campaign 2017 cost more than ten times, more than 40 million euros. It had an impact. Soros' popularity dropped. A whole country turned against the man. Soros became the epitome of evil.

Soros himself was trapped. "The more he had repulsed, the more he would have supported our claim that he was interfering in politics," says Birnbaum. Being a candidate against Orbán was also unthinkable for the then 87-year-old. "Mr. Soros is not a politician, "says his advisor Michael Vachon. Soros was checkmated.

Arthur Finkelstein had found his ideal opponent in him. "Mr. Liberal, "as he had always wanted him to be. The incarnation of all the contradictions that hate Conservatives on economically successful leftists: a financial speculator who at the same time demanded a milder capitalism. Best of all, this campaign opponent was neither in politics nor in the country at all. "The perfect opponent is someone you hit again and again and who never hits back," says Birnbaum. Even today he can rave about it. "It was so obvious. It was the simplest of all products. You just had to pack it and market it. »

The "product" was so good, it marketed itself and wandered around the world. In 2017, it was fabulierte in Italy by Soros-funded refugee boats. In 2018, the US suspected that Soros was behind the "caravan" of migrants in Mexico. In Italy, Matteo Salvini cursed his opponents as being paid by Soros, in the European Parliament Nigel Farage and in Germany Stephan Brandner and Jörg Meuthen of the AfD.

From Colombia to Israel to Kenya and Australia, anti-Soros arguments emerge. A Polish parliamentarian called Soros the "most dangerous person in the world". Putin mentioned him in disapproval during his press conference with Trump in Helsinki. Trump in turn grabbed Soros end of 2016 in his final commercial. And last, he claimed that the demonstrations against his Supreme Court candidate, Brett Kavanaugh, were sponsored by Soros.

Hungary functions as a bridgehead in a rhetorical teamwork between Trump and Putin. In Austria, the name Soros appeared in the context of a choice on the train of the «Silberstein affair». It later leaked that, among other things, fake Facebook accounts had been used, mentioning Soros' "plan". In the campaign team: Birnbaum and Finkelstein.



The return of the evil jew

Pirnbaum resists the assumption that he has led further anti-Soros campaigns outside of Hungary. But maybe it did not need that either. He and Finkelstein had created in Hungary the most powerful enemy image of the right-wing movement of recent times - perfect material for the Internet. On the one hand, right-wing digital media such as "Breitbart" and "Russia Today" attacked the Hungarian campaign, translated it into other languages ??and fed it with arguments. On the other hand, there are the social networks, over which the evil Soros became independent as a meme.

If right-wing movements want to campaign today, they can simply fish Soros material off the net. Anti-Soros is a globalized, freely available and adaptable open source weapon. Birnbaum calls her "the common denominator of the nationalist movement". It was no coincidence that Steve Bannon called for fighting against Soros when he wanted to enter the EU election campaign.

At this point, one must again come to speak of an equally important and strange aspect of this story: Two Jewish political advisers make a Jew the target of a campaign with anti-Semitic features.

What Finkelstein and Birnbaum have built ties seamlessly to one of the oldest anti-Semitic subjects in Western history: the evil, greedy in money, who wants to rule the world. Even if Orbán's campaign never used the word Jew, Orbán said he was fighting an "enemy" who was "different," "homeless" -and wanted to own the world. Logically, that then Jewish stars were scribbled on the Soros posters - the voters completed the campaign. Anyone looking for Soros on the Internet will immediately come across Mondays: Soros' head on the octopus of an octopus, a classic anti-Semitic motif.

In 2017, the Jewish community began to protest in Hungary, and the Israeli ambassador intervened. When Zoltán Radnóti, a well-known Hungarian rabbi learned that the campaign was being led by members of the Jewish community, he was shocked by the public. The Jewish world is divided as to whether the campaign is anti-Semitic. One day, remembers Birnbaum, he was taken in the US a member of the Anti-Defamation League aside and addressed. For years, the organization has observed an increase in hatred of the Jews on the Internet and has devoted a separate chapter in a study of the propaganda against Soros.

Birnbaum, who respects the Sabbath and is organized in numerous Israeli associations, is outraged by this question. The campaign was a "purely ideological" project, he says. Soros stood for everything Orbán was against. "When we planned the campaign, we never thought for a second that Soros was a Jew." He himself did not even know it then. He never works with anti-Semites. Even before the beginning of cooperation with Orbán, he had inquired in Israel in informed circles, how Orbán stood with the Jews. He had heard nothing suspicious. On the contrary, Orbán pursues anti-Semitism consistently. He gave his first daughter the Jewish name Ráhel. And besides: "Can not I attack someone because he is a Jew?"

It must be argued that the two Campaigners had known the name Soros for decades and Finkelstein was already involved in a scandal in the 1980s, when he had investigated and instrumentalized anti-Semitic attitudes of voters of a candidate. This time the consequences are harder. The campaign has changed the world. Words became reality.

In the US, Soros receives a letter bomb from a Trump supporter at the end of October. Five days later, an armed man storms a synagogue in Pittsburgh and murders eleven people. He saw himself fighting a Jewish conspiracy. On his social media account he spoke of the "Soros caravan". Confronted with these facts, Birnbaum sounds depressed: "Looking back, it might look crazy what we did, but from that point of view it was right."



Merely a new victim

Six months after the meeting in Berlin, Birnbaum invites to the lounge of the Trump Hotel in Washington DC. A friend has a vernissage: Corey Lewandowski introduces his Trump book. Presidential Adviser Kellyanne Conway watches, caviar is sold, $ 100 an ounce. There is dance music, the waiters are almost all dark-skinned, the guests almost all white. Birnbaum chats with visitors to the closed event and orders Moscow Mule.

Did he change his mind about the Soros campaign? "Anti-Semitism is something eternal, indelible," he replies. "Our campaign did not make anyone anti-Semitic who it was not before. Maybe she has shown a new victim. Not more. I would do it again."

In December Ignatieff had to announce the move of the University of Budapest to Vienna. The Open Society Foundation moved its headquarters to Berlin. Orbán is in the process of expanding his media empire. At home, but also in other countries. He has big plans. In May is European election. Hungary became a role model for rights worldwide. And Orbán has a new form of government, explains a Fidesz insider. Each of Orbán's steps would be "pollinated" beforehand. Politicians would no longer have to formulate visions, but depict what the people are currently doing. Orbán calls it «an illiberal state».

Arthur Finkelstein died in August 2017. Hungary was his final project. In 2011, in one of his last public speeches, he said, "I wanted to change the world. I managed to archieve that. I made her worse. "



Personally I'm pretty amazed by this. I always thought you should never make a campaign that tells people the other party is bad, but should rather present good ideas yourself. But here we see that merely making your opponent look bad is apparently a very viable option if you're a conservative.

Its also amazing that people in Hungary fell so easily to such a kind of campaign, even for the first wave, before Soros.

The "antisemitism will always exist [anyway]" line is also especially surprising. That sounds a lot like "wars will always exist anyway", a rationalization that you can hear from certain people (namely politicians from both parties, think tank members) from the USA when you ask why the USA keeps starting wars all over the world. But these people dont target their own country with their wars.
#14980809
Negotiator wrote:Personally I'm pretty amazed by this. I always thought you should never make a campaign that tells people the other party is bad, but should rather present good ideas yourself. But here we see that merely making your opponent look bad is apparently a very viable option if you're a conservative.


Funny I always thought of that as a leftist thing and you are doing it yourself too.

Negotiator wrote:Its also amazing that people in Hungary fell so easily to such a kind of campaign, even for the first wave, before Soros.

The "antisemitism will always exist [anyway]" line is also especially surprising. That sounds a lot like "wars will always exist anyway", a rationalization that you can hear from certain people (namely politicians from both parties, think tank members) from the USA when you ask why the USA keeps starting wars all over the world. But these people dont target their own country with their wars.


The book is swapping one "evil jew" Soros for another Finkelstein.
#14980881
Being a sleazy and corrupt communist currency speculator doesn't make him "evil," but it is pretty hard to ignore the harm he has done. The 1998 currency crisis in Asia was all his doing.

For some reason, the leaders of leftism around the globe are the worst, most malevolent, dishonest, corrupt, and selfish "humans" alive today. Look at the last few Dem Prez candidates. Each one of them isn't just sleazy.... far worse.

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