I wish Beck could be just laughed off.
He’s absurd, ignorant, poisonous — but also dangerous. He does have an audience, some of which is obnoxiously pugnacious and alarmingly coercive.
Today, Salon‘s Alex Pareene has a very good profile on Beck’s lunacy as he continues his Roger Ailes-sanctioned rant against George Soros and “reformed Judaism.
Beck says that “reformed Judaism” is basically akin to radical Islam.
Now, the Fox Network is aiming its bigotry at Jews as well as Muslims.
Pareene writes:
Glenn Beck said something stupid about Jewish people, today. Just FYI. On his radio program, while discussing George Soros, Beck says Reform Judaism is “almost like” “radicalized Islam.”
Glenn Beck has called Soros a Nazi collaborator and claimed that the man is bent on world domination, and now he is claiming that Reform Jews are not real Jews, because many of them tend to be liberal. Most surveys find that a plurality of American Jews are Reform, and Glenn Beck thinks they resemble religious extremists, because he does not consider them sufficiently spiritual.
Beck will almost certainly not be called on any of this by the Anti-Defamation League, the self-appointed arbiter of what should be considered anti-Semitic or not, because the head of the ADL is very, very good chums with Beck’s boss, Roger Ailes (a man who helped make virulent anti-Semite Richard Nixon president way back in the 1960s). When he utilized ancient and obvious anti-Semitic tropes to attack Soros in the first place, they gave him a pass because, they said, he “doesn’t understand” what he’s doing.
Here is the rest of Pareene’s piece.
— Steve Clemons
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