George Soros should ask for his money back, the million dollars he gave Media Matters to go after Fox News is a waste. Glenn began a series of shows exposing the  financier and Democratic Party sugar daddy Soros and what was the best the progressive spin shop come up with? Something that will rank as probably the lamest charge of Antisemitism made since God told Abraham to leave Ur, the land of his birth, his kindred and his father’s house, and move to the Holy Land and create the first “Jewish neighborhood.”

First they made the charge against the Beck-owned website, The Blaze.

Beck’s webpage pushes book that smears Soros with anti-Semitic sterotypes:

Today Glenn Beck’s The Blaze turned to “Zubi Diamond, author of The Wizards of Wall Street” in order to push the claim that George Soros may be “betting on U.S. financial collapse.” According to Diamond, Soros’ agenda is “to destroy capitalism.”

That the Blaze would turn to Diamond to further Beck’s smear campaign against Soros is telling: Diamond’s self-published book is littered smears of George Soros that are rooted in anti-Semitic stereotypes, including calling Soros the “mastermind” behind of a “cabal of slithery rich” who “visited financial violence on the American people to get Barack Obama elected.”

You waiting for the anti-Semitic part?  Me too. Or is that Media Matters is claiming every cabal of slithery rich is Jewish?

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It’s impossible to avoid the apocalypse these days. Whether we encounter the End in the form of news reports on Global Warming, or fears of Iran getting bomb, or plague panics such as H1N1, we seem to be living in a high point of apocalyptic anxiety, with horrible Doomsdays lurking round every corner.

And yet, the End has never been so much fun.  Roland Emmerich released his latest apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 in November, and since then we have enjoyed Zombieland, The Road, The Book of Eli, Legion and even Al Gore’s dreadful poem read aloud on morning TV in the presence of a fawning sycophant. Much more is to come, and this is to say nothing of video games, books, comics, or half the output of the History Channel.

What lies behind this fascination with the End? Dr. Richard Landes, professor of mediaeval history at Boston University, is a renowned scholar of apocalyptic movements who has been thinking about Doomsday for forty years. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and author of the upcoming Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience. Landes is an exceptionally interesting thinker who applies his knowledge of past apocalypses to our present fears, an analysis which frequently informs the articles he publishes at his website The Augean Stables.

Recently I phoned him from my base in Texas, to chat about mankind’s enduring love affair with the apocalypse. I caught him in Tel Aviv airport at 2 a.m, and it was then, against a backdrop of deepest night, that we spent two hours discussing the end of the world: (more…)