Soros Forgiven, Pope Not So Much

By Jack Cashill

The media are aghast at Glenn Beck's largely accurate account of George Soros' early years. Reads the New York Daily News altogether typical headline: "Is Glenn Beck an anti-Semite? Fox host slammed by Anti-Defamation League for attack on George Soros."

Beck related that as an adolescent in Hungary during WW II, Soros posed as a Christian and accompanied his patron on his rounds confiscating Jewish property. Added Beck, an ardent supporter of Israel, "I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he's 14 years old. He was surviving. So I'm not making a judgment."

That was not qualification enough for Beck's media critics. The AtlanticWire headlined its story, "Was Glenn Beck's George Soros Takedown Anti-Semitic?" The Huffington Post ranted, "Glenn Beck's Horrific Lie -- He Must Be Fired."

You don't have to turn over a whole lot of rocks to find the double standard here. When Cardinal Josef Ratzinger first emerged as a leading candidate for the papacy in 2005, the eminent U.K. Times headlined its main story, "Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth."

Seven paragraphs into the Times story the reader begins to learn the facts of Ratzinger's youth. He was six when Hitler came to power. His father was so outspoken an anti-Nazi the family had to move multiple times. He joined the Hitler Youth at 14 only when membership became compulsory. He quickly got a dispensation to join the seminary. When conscripted into defense work, he deserted and ended up in a concentration camp.

Undeterred by the facts, the Daily Kos greeted Ratzinger's selection as Pope Benedict XVI with the headline, "Call Ratzinger Nazi Pope." In 2008, to deflect criticism of President Obama's ties to crackpot reverend Jeremiah Wright, Chris Kelly of the Huffington Post blustered, "Bill O'Reilly -- who claims to love America -- spent Sunday at a ‘church' run by a former Hitler Youth named Joseph Alois Ratzinger."

Added the daringly blasphemous Kelly, "Ratzinger has gone to elaborate ends to hide this connection, including taking on the absurd pseudonym "Pope Benedict XVI." In the one religion Kelly and friends have seen fit to defend, that kind of insult could provoke a well-deserved fatwah.