Soros founded University kicked out of Hungary

[Jaga]

An American university established a quarter-century ago to educate a new generation of leaders and scholars after communism’s collapse in Central and Eastern Europe said Monday it has been kicked out of its home in Hungary.

The ejection marked one of the surest signals to date of autocracy’s return to the country, and the region, after decades of relative freedom. It is the first time a university has been forced out of an European Union nation.

Central European University has long been considered among the world’s finest graduate schools, attracting students from across the globe, and it is widely seen as the best in Hungary.

But the university, which was founded by Hungarian American financier George Soros, has also been the target for nearly two years of a right-wing government that has systematically consolidated control and marginalized dissent.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been particularly ruthless in attacking anything associated with Soros, whose open and liberal philosophy is the antithesis of the illiberal, nationalist and nativist view celebrated by Orban.

The university said Monday it was left with no choice but to move its primary campus to Vienna next year after Orban’s government refused to acknowledge an agreement that would enable the school to continue to admit new students in Budapest.

An American university established a quarter-century ago to educate a new generation of leaders and scholars after communism’s collapse in Central and Eastern Europe said Monday it has been kicked out of its home in Hungary.

www.washingtonpost.com/world/soros-founded-university-says-it-has-been-kicked-out-of-hungary-as-an-autocrat-tightens-his-grip/2018/12/03/26bdfc28-f6ed-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html?utm_term=.ef431978feed

The ejection marked one of the surest signals to date of autocracy’s return to the country, and the region, after decades of relative freedom. It is the first time a university has been forced out of an European Union nation.

Central European University has long been considered among the world’s finest graduate schools, attracting students from across the globe, and it is widely seen as the best in Hungary.

But the university, which was founded by Hungarian American financier George Soros, has also been the target for nearly two years of a right-wing government that has systematically consolidated control and marginalized dissent.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been particularly ruthless in attacking anything associated with Soros, whose open and liberal philosophy is the antithesis of the illiberal, nationalist and nativist view celebrated by Orban.

The university said Monday it was left with no choice but to move its primary campus to Vienna next year after Orban’s government refused to acknowledge an agreement that would enable the school to continue to admit new students in Budapest.

[pieter]

In 1989 the American-Hungarian financier George Soros paid for Viktor Orbán to study in Britain. Two decades later, he donated $1m to Orbán’s government to help the cleanup after the “red sludge”

Over the years, the billionaire has spent hundreds of millions of dollars financing education and civil society projects in Hungary, the country of his birth, through his Open Society Foundations (OSF).

But now Soros has become the Hungarian prime minister’s No 1 political target.

www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/22/hungary-viktor-orban-george-soros

The left-wing and liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz writes: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have a lot in common and much to bond over. Both leaders position themselves in the center right, but over the years have had to lurch rightward to consolidate their hold on power, in the face of challenges from more extreme political parties.

Their get-together, in December 2016, was expected to be a refreshing change from lectures by Western counterparts over their policies – in Israel’s case, over the Palestinians and settlements; in Hungary’s, its harsh immigration policy and its troubling xenophobic tone, and harsh crackdown on political dissent.

Now, like an unwelcome guest, George Soros ruined their party planning.

Instead of a harmonious lead-up to the first visit of a sitting Israeli prime minister to Hungary since the end of communism in 1989, Netanyahu’s trip was marred by controversy. The fuss centered on Orbán’s new and intense political campaign vilifying the Jewish billionaire – one that Hungarian Jews say has stirred up anti-Semitism in Hungary to such an extent that they implored Israeli leaders to speak out against it.

Netanyahu may see himself as the leader of the Jewish people, but there are some Jews he is decidedly unenthusiastic about representing. And Soros probably tops that list.

Israel’s foreign ministry issued a statement denouncing U.S. billionaire George Soros, a move that appeared designed to align Israel more closely with Hungary ahead of a visit to Budapest in juli 2017 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel’s ambassador to Hungary issued a statement denouncing the campaign, saying it “evokes sad memories but also sows hatred and fear”, an apparent reference to Hungary’s part in the deportation of 500,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

But hours after the ambassador made his comments over the weekend, Israel’s foreign ministry issued a “clarification” saying that Soros was a legitimate target for criticism.

“In no way was the statement (by the ambassador) meant to delegitimize criticism of George Soros, who continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected governments,” said foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon, adding that Soros funded organizations “that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself”.

Soros was the 19th richest person in the world last year according to Forbes, reportedly worth more than $25 billion. He was born György Schwartz, to an upper-middle class Jewish family in Budapest in 1930. In 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary, the Soroses – who changed their name to avoid detection as Jews – escaped the mass deportation and murder of over half a million of their brethren by obtaining false papers that allowed them to pose as Christians. After the war ended, Soros left Hungary for England and the United States, where he became one of the world’s most successful strategic investors.

He is also a deep-pocketed philanthropist, aiming his donations – and substantial political campaign contributions – in a progressive political direction. His Open Society Foundations has the mandate of advancing “justice, education, public health, business development and independent media,” and he has given away billions to pro-democracy organizations, dissident groups in repressive regimes, supported education through scholarships and support for university, anti-poverty causes and decriminalization of marijuana in the United States.

Soros has been lionized by the left and vilified by the right worldwide; one side of the political map viewing his work as progress toward a more free and just world, the other – particularly on its extreme fringes – viewing him as running a devious, even satanic, effort to create a new world order.

He is a favorite bogeyman of the political right, not only in Europe but also the United States. He featured in the closing ad of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, his face appearing amid accusations that “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.” According to the ad, which was criticized for striking an anti-Semitic tone, Trump was the only thing standing between this greedy cabal and innocent American citizens.



Text quotes, sources: The Guardian, Reuters and Haaretz.

Soros started his philanthropy not in Central and Eastern Europe but in apartheid-era South Africa in 1979. There, he gave scholarships to black South Africans to attend the University of Cape Town. Five years later, in 1984, he began the first Open Society in Europe in Hungary.

The name of the foundation was inspired by Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Soros encountered Popper as a student at the London School of Economics decades before and was evidently so taken with the philosopher’s ideology that he named his organization after it.


Sir Karl Raimund Popper CH FBA FRS[9] (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher and professor. In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing open society possible.

Soros established a network of Open Society organizations across Central and Eastern Europe in part because he was worried about an intellectual exodus, according to Jan Orlovsky, the head of Slovakia’s Open Society, who spoke to FP in his office in Bratislava’s Old Town. Soros wanted the region to be a place where people could see themselves staying — and staying within liberal democratic societies. “’I don’t want people to feel like they need to leave,’” Orlovsky said of Soros’s thinking.

[pieter]

[pieter]

[kaima]

Where does George Soros find the time?

By Dana Milbank

December 3 at 8:08 PM

To hear the loon-o-sphere tell it, the Hungarian-born liberal Jewish billionaire, at the ripe old age of 88, has been exceedingly industrious.

He dismantled the Soviet Union, launched coups in four Eastern European countries and a revolution in a fifth, while also destroying the Malaysian economy and financing Halliburton.

He caused the 2008 global financial crisis, bought the presidency for Barack Obama, wrote the 2009 stimulus and served as “puppetmaster” for Hillary Clinton.

He organized the Ferguson, Mo., protests, the 2016 post-election protests, the Women’s March, the March for Science, the Parkland, Fla., gun-control protests, the anti-Kavanaugh protests, the NFL national anthem protests, the migrant caravan — and also, paradoxically, the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville.


He controls the State Department, the Democratic Party and the union movement and is financing a “Purple Revolution” to overthrow President Trump, as well as efforts to break up the euro zone, depose the Turkish president and destroy Facebook.

How the George Soros conspiracy theory keeps popping up on Fox networks
The billionaire philanthropist has long been a point of conversation for Fox network hosts and guests alike. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

In his free time, Soros supports terrorists, illegal drugs, tax evasion, censorship, communists, one-world government, open borders, euthanasia, North Korea and Iran. A Nazi collaborator as a child, he currently serves as the anti-Christ.

In ordinary times, all but the most deranged Alex Jones listener would recognize the above as wackadoodle, tied together by a common libel used against Jews for centuries: the clandestine manipulation of events.

But these are not ordinary times, and Trump and his advisers are not only endorsing the conspiracy theories but also assigning a whole new portfolio of world-domination responsibilities to Soros — as if he didn’t already have enough on his plate.


Trump, in his closing ad of the 2016 campaign, featured Soros and two other American Jews as part of a “global power structure” acting in cahoots with Clinton against America. More recently, he suggested that the Brett M. Kavanaugh protesters were “paid for by Soros,” and said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Soros were behind the caravan. “A lot of people say yes.”

Donald Trump Jr. has echoed the Nazi-collaborator slander and the Ferguson allegation, and Rudy Giuliani circulated the “anti-Christ” idea.

A consequence: Soros was one of the attempted targets of a Trump fan in Florida who sent pipe bombs to the president’s critics, and the suspect in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre had posted online about Soros controlling the caravan, as Trump had suggested.

“There are those — including the president of the United States — who rail against ‘globalists’ that are ruining the country, a term popularized by the alt-right who regularly use it as a euphemism for Jews,” Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt said at the group’s annual summit Monday. “During this past election, there were television ads run by mainstream political candidates and parties that shamefully portrayed the Jewish philanthropist George Soros, casting him as a grotesque caricature pulled right from the pages of the Protocols of Zion responsible for all the world’s ills.”


Last week, The Post’s Felicia Sonmez reported that the director of the U.S. Agency for Global Media apologized to Soros last month for a taxpayer-financed program the agency aired describing Soros as a “nonpracticing Jew of flexible morals.” The program claimed he was involved in “clandestine operations that led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union” and described him as “the architect of the financial collapse of 2008.”

On Monday, even as the ADL was decrying the Protocols-of-Zion style attacks on Soros, the Trump administration was enabling such attacks.

As The Post’s Griff Witte reported, Hungary’s autocratic leader Viktor Orban — who has engaged in an ugly anti-Semitic campaign against Soros — succeeded in forcing the Soros-founded Central European University, a top institution, to leave the country.


Incredibly, U.S. Ambassador David B. Cornstein, a jeweler and longtime Trump pal, admitted he tried neither incentives nor threats to sway his “friend” Orban. Cornstein instead “blamed the university’s founder” — Soros — “for the school’s departure and refused to criticize Orban,” Witte reported.

As part of Orban’s persecution of Soros — whose Open Society Foundation has championed democratic institutions in Eastern Europe — the Hungarian government put up billboards last year (many soon covered in anti-Semitic graffiti) that evoked Nazi propaganda. The government, falsely claiming Soros wanted to flood Hungary with illegal immigrants, pushed a “Stop Soros” law targeting non-governmental organizations and passed legislation targeting what it called “the Soros university.”

The university has bipartisan support in Washington, and Cornstein (who said during his confirmation that he was a “proud American Jew” concerned about Hungary’s anti-Semitism) promised to protect it.

But Trump’s man did no such thing. Instead, he said he saw no problems with human rights in Hungary and claimed evicting the university “doesn’t have anything to do with academic freedom.” The fault, Trump’s man said, is Soros’s.

Isn’t it always?

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www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/of-course-its-george-soross-fault-its-always-george-soross-fault/2018/12/03/ddc929a0-f743-11e8-8c9a-860ce2a8148f_story.html?utm_term=.b4bb1c564e08