Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah starts off his Dec. 11 WorldNetDaily column by displaying his infamous thin skin about criticism of him and WND.
He attacks Jonathan Kay, opinion page editor at Canada's National Post, as someone "pretending to be a 'conservative' who loves trashing conservatives and defending socialists." Responding to a column by Kay pointing out that WND "defines the exact inflection point on the spectrum of right-wing punditry where legitimate journalism ends and out-and-out conspiracism begins," Farah writes that he "didn't even respond" when it came out, going on to belittle Kay: "Who would care enough to read what would have to be a lengthy column pointing out numerous falsehoods, ad hominem attacks, mischaracterizations and religious bigotry he displayed in the piece? After all, who was Jonathan Kay?" Farah later denounces Kay as "a second-rate columnist pretending to be something he's not."
Of course, Farah doesn't contradict anything Kay wrote in that column. Instead, he takes offense at another Kay column, this time criticizing Glenn Beck's false claims about George Soros:
Kay doesn't actually counter a single accusation Beck made in his thorough and well-researched profile of Soros. Instead, he attacks the messenger by all but accusing him of anti-Semitism.
"According to Beck's conspiracist (Kay's favorite word) narrative, there seems to be no sin that cannot be laid at Soros' feet – even "the crimes of the Nazis," writes Kay. "Soros is Jewish. When the Nazis occupied his native Hungary, Soros, like some other Jewish children, was recruited to help deliver deportation notices to Jewish families. Out of this fact has grown a mythology that paints Soros (who was 14 at the time) as a full-blown Nazi collaborator. Beck wallowed in this material during his Fox broadcast."
Beck did no such thing. He didn't wallow in this material. In fact, he simply recounted Soros' own description of this period in his young life – pointing out that he "enjoyed" working for the Nazis and victimizing his fellow Jews.
First, spending the better part of three days attacking Soros, which Beck did onhis Fox News show, is arguably "wallowing." Second, Soros has never claimed he "'enjoyed' working for the Nazis and victimizing his fellow Jews." Heck, even Beck didn't say that, at least not in so many words. Beck said that "I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that," but attacking Soros for allegedly not showing remorse for "helping send the Jews to the death -- death camps."
Of course, that's not what Soros did. He sent nobody to death camps; Soros biographer Michael T. Kaufman points out that the school-age Soros had been selected by the local Nazi-operated Jewish Council as a courier to deliver letters to Jewish residents that, as his father correctly suspected, would eventually result in the deportation of those residents. Soros said that his father "told me to deliver the notices, but to tell the people if they reported they would be deported," and after that instance, he stopped being a courier.
Farah has a vested interest in keeping Beck's Soros falsehoods alive -- there are likely more than a few of them in WND Whistleblower magazine's issue dedicated to Soros. It'spromoted with a quote from WND managing editor David Kupelian screeching that Soros "opposes free-market capitalism" -- laughable when you consider that Soros has made his billions through free-market capitalism andhelped to overthrow communist and totalitarian regimes.
But, as Kay utterly correctly demonstrated, the truth is less important to WND than pushing its far-right agenda. No wonder Farah is mad at Kay -- he told the truth about Farah and WND.
