
Transnationalist billionaire George Soros is spreading his left-wing wealth across the globe. The NYTimes reports a record Soros donation to
George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, plans to announce on Tuesday that he is giving $100 million to Human Rights Watch to expand the organization’s work globally.
It is the largest gift he has made, the largest gift by far that Human Rights Watch has ever received, and only the second gift of $100 million or more made by an individual this year, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
…Human Rights Watch will use the gift to add about 120 staff members to its team of 300 around the world, expand translation of its reports and open new offices. The intent, said Kenneth Roth, the advocacy group’s executive director, is to increase its influence in emerging power centers. The group, which is based in New York, investigates and draws attention to human rights abuses around the world.
Mr. Roth said that South Africa had more sway in Zimbabwe than the United States and other Western powers. Similarly, India, China and Japan are more influential in Sri Lanka. “We need to try to generate pressure on those governments, those emerging powers, now, which means expanding our capacity to deploy our information,” Mr. Roth said.
Mr. Soros put it differently. “I’m afraid the United States has lost the moral high ground under the Bush administration, but the principles that Human Rights Watch promotes have not lost their universal applicability,” he said. “So to be more effective, I think the organization has to be seen as more international, less an American organization.”
The anti-Israel bias of HRW is so brazen that took to the blogosphere to denounce it:
“Who will guard the guardians?” asked Roman satirist Juvenal. Now we must ask, who is watching Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s best-financed and most influential human rights organizations? It turns out that they cook the books about facts, cheat on interviews, and put out pre-determined conclusions that are driven more by their ideology than by evidence. These are serious accusations, and they are demonstrably true.
…Many former supporters of Human Rights Watch have become alienated from the organization, because of, in the words of one early supporter, “their obsessive focus on Israel.” Within the last month, virtually every component of the organized Jewish community, from secular to religious, liberal to conservative, has condemned Human Rights Watch for its bias. HRW head Kenneth Roth and his organizations willful blindness when it comes to Israel and its enemies have completely undermined the credibility of a once important human rights organization. Human Rights Watch no longer deserves the support of real human rights advocates. Nor should its so-called reporting be credited by objective news organizations.
Closer to home, HRW has spearheaded pushed for
Now, HRW will reap the benefits of Recovery Summer indeed.
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Related must-read from
George Schwartz was born in Hungary in 1930 — not the luckiest time and place to be born a Jew.
George’s father Theodore tried to change the family’s fortunes by changing their name to something less Jewish-sounding. It didn’t help. And soon war came.
When the Nazis took total control of Hungary in 1944, the Holocaust followed. In two months, 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to death camps.
To survive, George, then a teenager, collaborated with the Nazis.
First he worked for the Judenrat. That was the Jewish council set up by the Nazis to do their dirty work for them. Instead of the Nazis rounding up Jews every day for the trains, they delegated that murderous task to Jews who were willing to do it to survive another day at the expense of their neighbours.
Theodore hatched a better plan for his son. He bribed a non-Jewish official at the agriculture ministry to let George live with him. George helped the official confiscate property from Jews.
By collaborating with the Nazis, George survived the Holocaust. He turned on other Jews to spare himself.
George moved to London after the war and then to New York, where he became a stockbroker. He’s rich now. Forbes magazine says he’s the 35th richest man in the world. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He goes by the name his father invented: George Soros.
How does Soros feel about what he did as a teenager? Has it kept him up at night?
Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes asked him that. Was it difficult? “Not at all,” Soros answered.
“No feeling of guilt?” asked Kroft. “No,” said Soros. “There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there. If I wasn’t doing it, somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. Whether I was there or not. So I had no sense of guilt.”
A Nazi would steal the Jews’ property anyways. So why not him?
That moral hollowness has shaped Soros’ life. He’s a rabid critic of capitalism, but in 1992 when he saw a chance, he speculated against the British pound, causing it to crash, devastating retirement savings for millions of Britons. Soros pocketed $1.1 billion for himself. If he didn’t do it, someone else would, right?
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