A group of 400 prominent Rabbis have called on Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch to bar Glenn Beck from making references to Nazis and the Holocaust on Beck's nightly show. In a full-page ad published in the Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch property, the clergymen ask that Beck be "sanctioned" for making "literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis." The group, Jewish Funds for Justice, took particular exception to attacks on Holocaust survivor and left-leaning billionaire George Soros. "You diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organization you disagree with," they wrote. Should Murdoch reprimand Beck and issue an apology? (Watch an MSNBC discussion with some of the rabbis)
No, these liberal rabbis should shut up: This criticism isn't about the Holocaust, says Abby Wisse Schachter in the New York Post. "This is all about politics." These "religiously left-wing rabbis" just want Beck off the air because they don't like his politics — and, being "political liberals," they love George Soros, too.
"Don't listen to shameful rabbis, Mr Murdoch"
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Yes, Beck is an out-of-control anti-Semite: No matter what Murdoch's henchmen might say, says Dana Millbank in The Washington Post, the signatories of this letter aren't just Beck's usual liberal critics. They include many conservative and orthodox rabbis. Beck's anti-Semitic "violent words" must be censured. Let this letter be an "omen of Beck's end times."
The rabbis shouldn't have made this political: The rabbis are right, says Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary, that the Shoah should not be "abused for partisan political purposes." But by focusing solely on the "idiotic" Beck and Fox News, and not the "numerous misuses of Holocaust imagery by left-wing figures," the rabbis have lost their credibility.
"The difference between Commentary and the Jewish Funds for Justice rabbis"
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