by ASAD ABUKHALIL
Imagine if a Chinese billionaire were funding a political message in Western societies the way Open Society is doing in Arab countries.
“Independent media” are sweeping developing countries; money from NATO governments and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations are flooding the public sphere.
In the past, the U.S. government used to subsidize traditional newspapers in the Arab world: those that were the most reactionary and right-wing such as Al-Hayat, An-Nahar and Al-`Amal (the last one is the mouthpiece of the Phalanges Party) received the bulk of the funding.
Their mission was to bash progress, downplay the Palestinian question and to go after the foes of U.S. and Israel, i.e. the Palestinian resistance, the Arab left and most importantly and significantly, the Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdul-Nasser.
In that regard, Gulf regimes and Western powers funded the same outlets. Even when liberals or socialists or Democrats were in power in Western countries, the support for reactionary forces persisted.
U.S. and NATO governments find it rather cheap to launch internet-based media in developing countries. They all look the same and adopt the same message: a liberal social agenda accompanied by U.S. and Israeli military priorities and agendas.
You see it around the world, with civic groups engaged in the same mission benefiting from Western government funding and from private reactionary and liberal sources.
Soros (through his Open Society Foundations) has become ever present in the Arab world. But one is not able to talk about the billionaire (in the West and in the East) without having to explain his thrust and to exonerate him or herself from the ready charge of anti-Semitism.
That is a convenient method of intimidation — in line with how Israel and its supporters have succeeded, largely, in intimidating critics of Israel.
That success was manifested in the adoption by the U.S. State Department of the Zionist definition of anti-Semitism, by which criticism of Israel can be easily equated with anti-Semitism in terms of “proportion” of the criticisms and the “intensity.”
Real Antisemitism
There are of course right-wing reactionary forces in the West who can’t talk or refer to a person who is Jewish (or Jewish-born) without relating whatever complaints they have about him or her to his or her Jewishness. That is a clear symptom of anti-Semitism.
And the association of evil plots with Jewish money is as old as anti-Semitism itself. So, there are people who do attack Soros from an anti-Semitic point of view (or who infuse their attacks on Soros with their anti-Semitism), just as there are people who attack Israel from anti-Semitic perspectives.
But that does not make all attacks, no matter how strong or vicious, to be anti-Semitic (whether against Soros or against Israel).
Attacks on Muslim bankers or politicians or clerics don’t automatically imply motives of Islamophobia (granted that associating Jewry with banking is a classic anti-Semitic trope just as associating Muslims with fanatic clerics is an Islamophobic trope).
Consortium News for more