It’s President’s fault, says son of Soros
THE son of billionaire financier George Soros has blamed Donald Trump for the pipe bomb sent to his father’s house.
Alexander Soros, the prominent Democrat donor’s son, said the bomb was ‘profoundly disturbing’ and a ‘threat to the future of American democracy’
Mr Soros said that after Mr Trump was elected a ‘genie was let out of the bottle’ and the toxic atmosphere in the US has encouraged violence.
He added: ‘While the responsibility lies with the individual or individuals who sent these lethal devices to my family home and Mr Obama’s and Ms Clinton’s offices, I cannot see it divorced from the new normal of political demonisation that plagues us today’.
The FBI said the device left at George Soros’s upstate New York home on Monday was hand delivered and was spotted by a caretaker who took it to the woods. It was safely detonated.
George Soros, 88, an investor who is worth £6.4 billion, is a hate figure for the American right who despise his funding of left-wing causes.
Earlier this year Mr Soros donated £400,000 to the Best for Britain campaign which wants Britain to stay in the European Union and is pushing for a second referendum on Brexit to ratify or reject Britain’s exit from the EU.
Alexander Soros, 33, who is deputy chairman of the Open Society Foundations, his father’s charitable organisation, wrote an article for the New York Times headlined: ‘The hate that is consuming us.’ He said his family were ‘no stranger’ to discrimination as his father grew up under the Nazi regime in Hungary before escaping to London and moving to America. The Open Society Foundations had ‘faced plenty of attacks along the way, many dripping with the poison of antiSemitism’ but things changed for the worse after the 2016 election.
Mr Soros wrote: ‘Before that, the vitriol (my father) faced was largely confined to the extremist fringes, among white supremacists and nationalists who sought to undermine the very foundations of democracy.
‘But with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, things got worse.’
Mr Soros pointed to the endorsements of Mr Trump by white supremacists and how the President featured his father in political adverts that suggested a Jewish conspiracy. The Trump administration has also frequently used the term ‘globalist’ as a thinly veiled attack on Jews.
Mr Soros wrote: ‘A genie was let out of the bottle, which may take generations to put back in, and it wasn’t confined to the United States.’
He added: ‘It is now all too “normal” that people who speak their minds are routinely subjected to personal hostility, hateful messages on social media and death threats.
‘...and all too normal that political leaders who swear an oath of office to protect all citizens instead pursue politics of division and hate.’
He ended the article by calling on people to reject politicians who are ‘cynically responsible for undermining the institutions of our democracy’.
Mr Soros wrote: ‘We must do it now, before it is too late.’