Peretz the Putz

Media Matters has an article up detailing the latest smear against George Soros.

In his column for the February 12 edition of The New Republic, editor-in-chief Martin Peretz cut out a key portion of a transcript in attacking billionaire philanthropist and progressive financier George Soros for his January 27 comment at the World Economic Forum that the United States has "to go through a certain de-Nazification process." Peretz claimed that Soros' comment was "twisted" because Soros "himself experienced something of Nazism," adding that Soros was "a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel."

This is undoubtedly the lowest libel the New Republic has ever published. Soros, like many Jews during the Holocaust, went undercover as a Gentile to avoid the concentration camps. The "stepfather" who took in young Soros oversaw the confiscation of property from Hungarian Jews, and fourteen-year old George Soros accompanied him on some of these trips. According to The New Republic, this makes him "a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel."

This particular argument condemns virtually everyone caught in the Nazi web: Poles were enslaved and made to work in factories in the Reich, concentration camps had their workshops that produced items like artificial rubber, V-2 rockets were constructed using labor from the concentration camp Dora, even US POW's who had dogtags indication their Judaism were forced into hard labor constructing bunkers and tunnels. According to Peretz, that would turn all these victims of Nazism into "cogs in the Hitlerite wheel."

Marty Peretz' moral compass is so broken that he can no longer tell the difference between the victims and perpetrators of a crime. Obviously it is time for him to take a break from the difficult work of punditry. If there was any justice in the world, he would have to spend the next few years conducting tours through the Holocaust Museum. He might actually learn something.