People should be very careful using the term anti-Semite, because if used too much (and for the wrong reason) the words lose their meaning. Same thing with the words racist, Nazi, Holocaust and apartheid. All are horrible words and each time they’re used they become a little less horrible. As a Jew I feel that one thing that Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel meant is that it’s my job to defend a non-Jew when he’s falsely accused of anti-Semitism.

Drifting through Media Matters the other day (it’s important to see what the other side is saying), I spotted a most disgusting headline.

Beck revives anti-Semitic Soros conspiracy theory

Furthering his long history of smearing George Soros, Glenn Beck advanced former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s anti-Semitic claim that Soros was “helped trigger the economic meltdown” of Southeast Asian currencies in 1997, which Mahathir had reportedly suggested was part of a Jewish “agenda.” In fact, Soros and other hedge funds were found not to be primarily responsible for the currency crisis, and Mahathir later retracted the claim…’

Mahathira did make that claim. In an interview with the BBC in October 1997 he said:

We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally Soros is a Jew. It is also a coincidence that Malaysians are mostly Moslem. Indeed, the Jews are not happy to see Moslems progress. If it were Palestine, the Jews would rob Palestinians. Thus this is what they are doing to our country.

But Beck didn’t make that claim; watch the video below used by Media Matters as to prove Beck’s Jew hatred.

Glenn Beck’s speech was all about George Soros destroying currencies after first warning people via a newspaper op-ed.  The word Jew wasn’t mentioned or even hinted at.

If pinning the title of currency speculator on George Soros makes one an anti-Semite I am going to get some dirty looks when I go to synagogue on Saturday, because I have made similar accusations about Soros many times.

What Media Matters isn’t revealing is Soros is a major funder of the organization. Three different Soros Charitable Foundations, individual members of the Soros family and the Geosor Corporation give hundreds of millions of dollars money to The Open Society Institute (see page 18 of the Institute’s nonprofit tax return posted here). Open Society gives money to the Center for American Progress who gives money to Media Matters.

Another Soros funded group that helps Media Matters is the Democracy Alliance. Keep in mind that Media Matters is not required to list its donors, this information comes from the tax returns of the foundations that give it money. So there may be other donations we don’t know about.

The Media Matters attack on Glenn Beck is designed to help its “Sugar Daddy” by deflecting attention away from Beck’s currency argument.

There is something else Media Matters is not telling you.  Soros and Mahathira had a major feud going on which may have been the reason for Prime Minister’s charges. Lee Han Shih the publisher and editor of asia! Magazine reported:

Like a pair of bad tempered boys, Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia, and George Soros, the US billionaire speculator and philanthropist, had been feuding for a decade, using all sorts of platforms including a World Bank meeting for their fight. Then they kissed and made up in December 2006 when Soros took up an invitation by the London School of Economics Society to visit Kuala Lumpur.

That’s when the two reversed all charges they made about each other.

Soros on Mahathir:

• “Dr. Mahathir is a menace to his own country.”- September 20, 1997

• “I think Mahathir has made a great contribution to Malaysia’s material development but like all great men, he has made some great mistakes.”- December 2006

Mahathir on Soros:

• ‘”There is definite evidence that we cannot disclose. There is no doubt he did it.”- Mahathir 1997, on Soros’ role in triggering the Asian Currency Crisis
• “Mr Soros said he is not involved. I accept that.- December 2006

Mahathir the Jew Hater:

• “Soros is part of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”- Mahathir, 1997
• “Somehow or other, I have been labeled anti-Semitic. I would like to say that I am not anti-Semitic, not anti-Jew.”- Mahathir, December 2006
• “I accept that Dr. Mahathir is not anti-Semitic.”- Soros, December 2006.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should inform you that I am an extreme subscriber to Beck’s radio show and regular viewer on TV. Therefor most Mondays through Fridays for the past 18 months I have had “two doses” of Glenn Beck. Not once has he ever said anything that could remotely be called anti-Semitic.

Media Matters charge of anti-Semitism is more than a lie it takes an ugly term and cheapens it.  Even worse it breaks Jewish laws against Loshen Hora (disparaging speech). The harm done by speech is even worse than the harm done by something like theft because amends can be made for monetary harms, but  harm done by speech can never be repaired. As the Torah says: Thou shalt not go up and down as a tale-bearer among thy people (Lev. 19:16)

An old Chasidic tale teaches:  A man once went around spreading lies about the rabbi. Eventually he began to feel remorse for the wrong he had done. He went to the rabbi and begged his forgiveness, saying he would do anything to make amends. The rabbi said, “Take a feather pillow, cut it open, and scatter the feathers to the winds.” The man followed the request gladly. When he told the rabbi that he had done the task, the rabbi said, “Now, go try and gather the feathers. Because you cannot take back the damage your words have done, the same way you cannot than recollect the feathers.”

I’ll report. Y’all decide:

“N**ger!” taunted my jailers between tortures,” reported the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner about his suffering. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!”  laughed my torturers. For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell. That’s four feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.

I do not refer to Nelson Mandela. No, the prisoner was a black Cuban named Eusebio Peñalver, whose incarceration and torture at the hands of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s Stalinist regime stretched to 29 years, surpassing Nelson Mandela’s record in time behind bars and probably doubling the horrors suffered by Mandela during this period.

“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and booze, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent,” wrote Ernesto “Che” Guevara in his diaries.  When during a 1959 press conference a Cuban black asked Guevara, “what his Revolution would do for blacks?” Che sneered: “we’ll do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean: nothing!”

Che was much too modest. “Nothing” is not at all an accurate description of the Castro/Che treatment of Cuba’s blacks.  First, they forcibly overthrew a Cuban government where Cuban blacks served as President of the Senate, Miister of Agriculture, Chief of Army, and Head of State (Fulgencio Batista, a grandson of slaves who was born in a palm-roofed shack). Not that you’ll learn any of this from the liberals’ exclusive educational source on pre-Castro Cuba: the Godfather II movie.

Today the prison population in Stalinist/Apartheid Cuba is 90% black while only 9% of the ruling Stalinist party is black. Elsewhere liberals denounce such a thing as “racist apartheid.”

But have you ever heard of Eusebio Peñalver? He became a U.S. citizen and lived in Miami for almost 20 years and would have been a cinch for the media to track down. Ever see a CNN interview with him? Ever see him on 60 Minutes? Ever read about him in the New York Times? The Washington Post? The Boston Globe? Ever hear the NAACP or the Congressional Black Caucus mention him?

This being Black History Month should we expect a special on him on NPR and the History Channel? Why do I bother asking? He was a victim of the Left’s premier pin-up boys…nuff said.

Sr Peñalver served several months of this almost thirty-year sentence in a “punishment cell” barely big enough to stand in, where he languished naked and in complete darkness.

“Castro’s apologists,” he said in an interview with this writer, “those who excuse or downplay his crimes — these people be they ignorant, stupid, mendacious whatever–they are accomplices in the bloody tyrant’s crimes, accomplices in the most brutal and murderous regime in the hemisphere.”

“The Toast of Manhattan!” crowed Time magazine about Fidel Castro’s reception by Manhattan’s Beautiful People on his visit to address the U.N. General assembly in 1996, upon the U.N.’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

“The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” read a Newsweek story that week, referring to the social swirl that engulfed Castro. After Fidel’s whooping, hollering, foot-stomping ovation in the General Assembly, he was fêted by New York’s best and brightest, hobnobbing with dozens of Manhattan’s glitterati, pundits and power brokers.

First, there was dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House’s Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including a breathless Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Bernard Shaw, Barbara Walters and Tina Brown, all jostled for a brief tryst, cooing and gurgling to Castro’s every comment.

All clamored for autographs and photo ops. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass killer’s presence that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on the cheek.

“You people are the cream of the crop!” beamed the mass-murderer to the smiling throng that surrounded him.

“Hear, hear!” chirped the delighted guests while tinkling their wine glasses in appreciation and glee.

More perspective: according to Anti-Apartheid activists a grand total of 3,000 political prisoners passed through South Africa’s Robben Island prison in roughly 30 years under the Apartheid regime. Usually about a thousand were held. These were out of a South African population of 40 million.

According to the Human Rights group, Freedom House, a grand total of 500,000 political prisoners have passed through Castro’s various prisons and forced labor camps. At one time in 1961, some 300,000 Cubans were jailed for political offenses. This is out of a Cuban population in 1960 of 6.4 million.

A calculator will easily reveal the grotesque disparity between “The Toast of Manhattan’s!” repressions compared to Apartheid repression. The regime headed by the Stalinist dictator whom Tina Brown toasted was roughly twenty times as repressive as the one universally condemned by Manhattan’s enlightened opinion.

More recently “The Toast of Manhattan!”sentenced other blacks (Dr. Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20-year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King in a public square.  I will quote Antunez’ sister from a samizdat smuggled out of Cuba last year.

“The Cuban government tries to fool the world with siren songs depicting racial equality in our country. But it is all a farce, as I and my family can attest, having suffered from the systematic racism directed at us by Castro’s regime. My brother suffers the scourge of racial hatred every day. The beatings are always accompanied by racial epithets. They set dogs on him. They deny him medical attention. They kept him from attending his mother’s funeral. The only thing I have to thank Castro for,” she quoted her brother, “is for restoring the yoke of slavery that my ancestors lived under.”

Toast that, Tina.