The Finkelstein Formula
The advisor Arthur J. Finkelstein helped Reagan and Netanyahu win. The campaign against George Soros, however, is his perfidious masterwork. His English collaborator speaks for the first time.
He is the antichrist. The most dangerous person in the world. An old rich man, a speculator who had caused the collapse of the British pound in 1992, the Asian crisis of 1997, and the financial crisis of 2008. First he destroyed the Soviet Union and then Yugoslavia to open easy passage for Africans and Arabs so that they could drive out the Europeans. He sponsors left-wing extremists, wants to depose the president of the U.S. and profits from drug dealing and financial crimes. On the side, he finances euthanasia, censorship and terrorism. Even as a child, he turned over Jews to the Nazis although he is himself Jewish.
That's what one learns on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter if one enters "Soros." George Soros is a Jew, that's true, but everything else is false, invented and put out into the world as part of one of the most insidious and effective political campaigns of all time.
Only a few years ago, George Soros was a billionaire whose fundamental critique of capitalism was treasured even at the world economic forum in Davos. A currency trader who was once counted among the thirty richest people in the world but who donated the majority of his billions to his foundation. His Open Society Foundations are the third largest charitable organization in the world, just behind the Gates Foundation. While Bill Gates seeks to alleviate suffering in the world, e.g. by fighting malaria, Soros wants to better the world through, for example, building projects and starter capital for migrants. He seeks to realize the ideal of the open society that was formulated as the counterpart to totalitarianism by the philosopher he reveres, Karl Popper.
An office on the 38th floor of an angular glass tower in New York. There sits Michael Vachon, the personal advisor to Soros, with his head exploding. How is it possible that his boss was transformed from a globally respected philanthropist into one of the most hated people in the world? In 2017, Vachon began to poll public sentiment to see how big the problem is. An orange curve on his computer displays the results. It shows the reactions to the name of Soros on the net. Tens of thousands of mentions per week; in some weeks, almost one hundred percent negative. The graph is a febrile curve of hate.
Two people know the answer to Vachon's question. One is dead, the other waits on a sunny morning in June 2018 at the bounteous buffet of the Westin Grand Hotel in Berlin. A man with the body of a marathon runner, thin and stretched long. Skull and face are shaved perfectly clean; horn-rimmed glasses frame his piercing blue eyes. George Eli Birnbaum came into the world in Los Angeles in 1970, named, Birnbaum says, after his grandfather who was shot by the Nazis in front of his son, who barely escaped the Holocaust and fled to the United States.
But antisemitism followed the family to Atlanta, where Birnbaum grew up. Time and again, antisemitic slogans were spray-painted onto his private Jewish school. That left an impression. Every weekend his father would give him The Jerusalem Post to read: "First, you worry about what's happening to the Jews, then you can turn your attention to the rest of the world," he said. Thus, George Birnbaum was raised with the conviction that only a strong state of Israel could protect the Jews from another Holocaust.
It is difficult for him to speak about it, and this is the first time that Birnbaum has talked to a journalist about the matter. But this George Birnbaum has contributed decisively to strengthening the new right globally and to reviving antisemitism as a political weapon. Since he put a Jew in the crosshairs: George Soros.
The Candidate
It all began 23 years ago with the assassination of Minister President Yitzak Rabin. On November 4, 1995, Israel's greatest hope for peace bled to death. After the assassination, new elections were quickly instituted. The candidates: Shimon Peres, a social democrat of the founding generation who wanted to continue Rabin's peace process, and Benjamin Netanyahu, a management consultant, a newcomer and a right-winger. Many made fun of Netanyahu's ambitions. In polls, he was over 20 points behind Peres.
But then suddenly Netanyahu's Likud Party bombarded the airwaves with ominous election ads: "Peres will divide Jerusalem," the slogan read. That discomfited many voters. Still, this was a baseless assertion: Shimon Peres had no such plans. The race between Peres and Netanyahu was extremely close on election day. About ten p.m., the television stations announced a razor-thin victory by Peres, according to the first tabulations. Consequently, Netanyahu asked for the telephone and called "Arthur"—his secret campaign coordinator. Arthur Finkelstein is in New York but gets on the phone right away. He says that Netanyahu shouldn't worry. "I always win the close elections."
"Arthur Finkelstein was a genius," Birnbaum says. Finkelstein was a numbers person, a pollster. Pollsters are political advisors who develop tactics and strategies based on polls. Pollsters try to recognize opinions, moods, commonalities or divisions in the population, and to use that knowledge for the benefit of their clients.
Sometimes pollsters develop campaigns. In Israel, Finkelstein even developed a candidate: Jener Benjamin Netanyahu, who arose in opposition to Shimon Peres, was his creation. "Everything that Bibi did during the campaign was determined by Arthur," Netanyahu's biographers Ben Kaspit and Ilan Kfir write.
Finkelstein was a discreet person. Only two speeches by him can be found on the web. No one got a clear picture of him, not even his clients. He flew in, gave some suggestions and disappeared once more. He was never present on election day. His people, Arthur's kids as he called them, worked on location. One has to piece together information about Finkelstein. There are hints in the Israeli and Hungarian press. He is mentioned in documents. There are enormous holes in conversations with over a dozen insiders, including George Birnbaum himself.
Finkelstein is the common thread running through the recent history of the Republican Party, from Ayn Rand to Richard Nixon and on to Donald Trump. He became acquainted with Rand, the mother of the conservative movement, when he was in college. Later he helped the legendary Barry Goldwater who revitalized the Republican Party from the right in the 1960s. Finkelstein survived the Watergate scandal, was involved in Reagan's election win in 1980, worked for George Bush Sr. and also for a businessman named Donald Trump. He foretold Trump's political career. Trump's campaign team was studded with "Arthur's kids": Larry Weitzner, Tony Fabrizio and his old friend Roger Stone. Also Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador in Berlin, had a connection to Finkelstein, just like David B. Cornstein, U.S. ambassador to Hungary.
The link between Finkelstein and modern Republican communications can be shown quite simply: in his time as a central member of the campaign for Ronald Reagan, he sought votes for the candidate by means of the ominous, deeply reactionary slogan which is now known to all: Let's make America great again.
Fear as the Driver
Finkelstein followed a formula in the campaign that he continued to develop later: negative campaigning. In this election strategy, it's a matter of attacking the opponent's campaign, rather than presenting an agenda of one's own. Finkelstein's starting point: every election is already decided before the election. Most people know at the start for whom they want to vote, what they are for and what they are against. And it is incredibly difficult to convince them otherwise.
Simply put, it's much easier to demotivate people than to motivate them. Thus, it's possible to cause the opponent to lose critical votes. Today that's called voter suppression. Brad Pascale, who led Trump's digital campaign, described this as one of the most important devices of the 2016 election. The method reads like a "how to" of modern rightwing populism.
Originally a programmer in the financial industry, Finkelstein turned pollster and elevated population statistics such as age, place of residence, preferred candidate, political inclination, and number of church visits. His talent lay in recognizing patterns. For example: what are the common themes, those that interest most people? Which ones cause the most pain? Basically, he soon noticed, it's often the same: "drugs, criminality and skin color." That is cutting, he wrote in a memo to Richard Nixon in 1972. Finkelstein's goal was to polemicize the electorate in the extreme. To inflame factions against each other. The driving force: fear. "It has to be done so that it seems the danger comes from the left," he advised Nixon. He had to establish the ideas that would induce fear in the populace.
The main thing was to be constantly on the attack. Whoever didn't strike first would be struck by his opponent. And Finkelstein made it personal. Every campaign needed an enemy that had to be vanquished. He developed negative campaigning into a technique that he called rejectionist voting. The idea is not to talk about the advantages of your own candidate but to project all kinds of evil onto your opponent in order to destroy the confidence of his voters. In doing so, he was not careful about niceties. He did his job, just as a lawyer defends a murderer.
In the final stretch, Finkelstein would set a trap for the opponent, according to this method. He would publish a claim and count on the opponent to entrap himself as he tried to contradict the claim. As soon as the opponent reacts to the accusation, he associates himself with it. If he ignores it, he lets it go uncontradicted. In the best case, the assertion is itself already so strange or shocking that the media will propagate it.
Finkelstein became famous for turning the word "liberal" into a curse word. He called his opponents "ultraliberal," "crazy liberal" or "shameful liberal." Mark Mellman, the campaign guru for the Democrats, calls that Finkel Think: "trademark someone as liberal, slander them, repeat endlessly." The method was simple but effective. Conceivably, no one has elected more people to Congress than Finkelstein.
To Europe
In Israel, Finkelstein follows the recipe to the letter in 1996: he targets Peres from all the television stations. His short, snappy slogans are in all the media. In the final television appearance, Peres falls into the trap: he wants to clarify immediately that he does not plan to divide Jerusalem. He surrenders the debate to Netanyahu. When Peres wakes up on the day after the election, Netanyahu is the prime minister: 50.5% to 49.5%.
Finkelstein's friend and client Ron Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir and then Netanyahu financial contributor, had connected him with the job in Israel. In the beginning, it was a sideline. In fact, Finkelstein worked on the campaign against Bill Clinton's reelection.
Finkelstein finds out in Israel that his formula works elsewhere. After Netanyahu's victory, all the parties engage in negative campaigning, and Finkelstein is correspondingly in demand. He is behind Sharon's surprise win in 2001, followed later by Avigdor Lieber, a client still further to the right. The triumphs in Israel mark the start of a new phase: Finkelstein turns to Europe. To this end, he begins collaborating with George Eli Birnbaum, the man with the body of a marathon runner. Together they create a team that will later produce Finkelstein's enduring legacy—his monster.
Birnbaum is one of Arthur's k ids. Birnbaum says that he met the secret Republican star in the mid-1990s in Washington. At the time, the young man delivered stacks of questionnaires every day. "Everything that Arthur does is based on numbers," recalls Birnbaum, "but nobody could read the numbers like Arthur."
To the outside world, Finkelstein was an enigma, the strategist who worked for the right wing. But Birnbaum quickly came to know the private side of Arthur. A friendly, witty, brilliant and even modest man, full of anecdotes from the innermost circles of power. The offspring of a Jewish family in Queens that kept kosher. A nerd, the breast pocket of his button-down shirt stuffed with pens and note paper, so he could write down his inspirations.
In the uptight world of politics, he kept his tie loose and ran around the office in his sox. He could do what he wanted because he was the right side of the brain of the right wing. Once, so Finkelstein told a coworker, Reagan's chief of staff had written him a thank you note for "keeping his shoes on most of the time" in the Oval Office. His passion was electioneering. He told students in Prag that it reminded him of a sandy beach which at first looks all the same but constantly changes. A wave comes, or a storm, and everything is different. His love belonged to his two daughters--and his husband. Arthur Finkelstein, who propelled radical Republican homophobes into public office, was homosexual. Donald Curiale was the love of his life. The captain and the helmsman.
When in 1998 Finkelstein asks Birnbaum if he wants to work for Likud in Israel, it is a dream come true. Even when Netanyahu's bid for reelection fails, the two become a team. Finkelstein is the captain, Birnbaum is the helmsman. As Finkelstein commutes between New York and Israel, Birnbaum runs the office in Israel, where he quickly comes to lead Netanyahu's office, organize his appearances, represent him before the press and sometimes tend his children.
In 2006, Birnbaum founds the firm GEB International—with Finkelstein as a partner. Together they want to do a rollout in eastern Europe. Birnbaum is looking for clients, selling Finkelstein's formula. They help Calin Popescu-Tariceanu come to power in Romania; in Bulgaria they do the same for Sergei Stanischew.
In Hungary in 2008, there's a man who wants to return to power. His name is Viktor Orbán and is the former premier. His old friend "Bibi"--Benjamin Netanyahu--is read to help him. The two share a friendship of many years standing that is so close that some call it a "bromance." In fact, their greatest common ground is their work with Finkelstein and Birnbaum. According to the daily newspaper Haaretz, Netanyahu passed on the two election gurus to Orbán. It started in 2008, Birnbaum recalls, and they won a referendum right away that positioned Orbán and his conservative Fidesz movement for the 2010 elections.
If Finkelstein is seen as an artist, he created his masterpiece in Hungary, together with Birnbaum. They were retained for a year in Hungary, officially for the Fidesz-affliated Szádavég Foundation. For the 2010 election, they relied on Finkelstein's patented election recipe of battering the opponent's weaknesses, while keeping his own candidate out of the spotlight. The opposition, the ruling Social Democrats, were overwhelmed by the attacks. Even today, Birnbaum is stunned at how easy it was: "We had already blown the Social Democrats out of the water, even before the election."
New opponents are quickly found: Hungary is suffering at the time from the financial crisis and has to be saved by an influx of money. This in turn leads to belt-tightening measures dictated by the lender, the World Bank, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The Americans recommend that Orbán declare "the bureaucrats" and foreign capital to be the enemy. There follows a massive shift to the right in favor of Fidesz, and Orbán wins the election with a two-thirds majority.
Birnbaum and Finkelstein, who from this point on belonged to Orbán's innermost circle, had a problem. While the satisfied victor in the election rewrote the constitution, Finkelstein and Birnbaum once again lacked an opponent. "There was no longer an opposition," Birnbaum says. The ultra-rightist Jobbik Party and the Social Democrats were defeated, the rest were only splinter groups. "We had an officeholder with an historic majority, something that had never happened in Hungary. Birnbaum said that maintaining that state of affairs required a "high level of energy." "You have to keep the base energized. Give them a reason to get out for the next election." Birnbaum said that it had to be something powerful, like Trump's "Build the Wall" today.
The Perfect Opponent
Finkelstein's formula says that every successful campaign needs an enemy. "The best way to rouse the troops," Birnbaum explains. "Arthur always said that the fight wasn't against the Nazis but against Hitler, not against Al-Qaida but Osama Bin Laden." But who could this enemy be in Hungary? Where was the fire-breathing dragon that Orbán would fight with the help of the people?
Viktor Orbán was cooking up an alternative, more dramatic tale of his nation. A driving force is his close friend, the historian Mária Schmidt, whom he had elevated during his first term in 2002 to lead the national memorial for the victims of dictatorship. A feisty woman who had also inherited a lot of money. She imagines Hungary, which entered into a pact with Hitler, as the innocent victim that was surrounded by enemies and steadfastly guarded its original identity. For her, Hungary is a country in an eternal state of occupation. First the Ottoman Turks, then the Nazis, followed by the Communists. Hungary's mission: protect against outside influences and defend Christianity.
Reflecting on this background, Arthur Finkelstein had an inspiration. It is a campaign idea so big and so Mephistophelean that it would outlive its creator.
Basically, it is a continuation of the tale of "big international capitalism" that has banded together against little Hungary. But with a dramatic twist: What happens when the veil shielding the international capitalist conspiracy is ripped away and a figure enters who holds everything in his hands. Someone who not only steers "big capitalism" but embodies it? A real person. And furthermore a person born in Hungary. Foreign yet also familiar. This person is George Soros, Finkelstein says. And Birnbaum recognized immediately the genius of the idea: "Soros was the perfect enemy."
In this moment, the monster "George Soros" is born. A multibillionaire, so powerful and connected worldwide that, to defeat him, the whole nation has to unite behind Orbán. Here in Hungary, the demon is created that would soon be taken up by politicians all over the world. And up to and inside the German parliament and the parliament house in Bern.
At first glance, Finkelstein's suggestion seems somewhat bizarre. An election campaign against someone who is not a politician. A person who doesn't even live in Hungary. An old man who is known across the country as a patron and benefactor. Someone who, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, had supported the opposition against the Communists, and afterwards had donated school lunches to children, and later established in Budapest one of the best universities in Europe.
Even Orbán had once received donations from Soros: during his time in the opposition, his underground organization had published critical periodicals, produced on a copy machine that Soros had paid for. Orbán was also among the over 15,000 students who were awarded scholarships by the Open Society Foundations. Only thanks to Soros was Orbán able to study philosophy. The two met only once: when Soros came to Hungary after a catastrophic flood in order to offer a million dollars in emergency assistance.
There was really no reason to be against him.
A Means to an End
Finkelstein and Birnbaum saw something entirely different in George Soros. There is a long history of criticizing Soros. It reaches back to 1992, when Soros earned a billion dollars overnight through currency trading--and earned himself the reputation as the person who had single-handedly driven British citizens into poverty. For many on the Left, Soros was a plague. Until he used his sudden fame to publicize leftist-liberal ideals. He was for everything that the right was against: climate protection, redistribution of wealth, the Clintons. He opposed the second Iraq war in 2003, compared George W. Bush with the Nazis and turned into a heavy donor for the Democrats. That's how he became the enemy for the Republicans.
But there was more. Finkelstein and Birnbaum had expanded their operations into the very countries in which the Open Societies Foundation had most intensively supported local liberal elites and civil rights movements: Ukraine, Romania, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, and Albania. Birnbaum, the silent right-wing, rejects Soros. He finds that Soros stands for "a socialism that is wrong for these regions." But Finkelstein saw all this from a purely rational point of view: Soros as the enemy was just the means to an end.
Telephone polls are used to find out if George Soros' name is sufficiently well known, testing his name along with several other possible enemies, according to a person who was involved in the questioning. Birnbaum himself declines to confirm the polling in the Soros case.
Then Orbán had to be convinced. Birnbaum says, Orbán trusted Finkelstein "enormously." Orbán's spokesperson declined to comment. "Nobody was more important for Orbán's politics than Finkelstein," a former Hungarian Fidesz pollster says. "And Finkelstein never had a better pupil."
For Orbán, the anti-Soros campaign made sense for both national and international politics. In international politics, it would please their Russian neighbors. Putin was afraid of so-called "color" revolutions like the Arab Spring or in the Ukraine and had started to combat Soros and his furtherance of liberal forces. They were united by a common enemy. At home, the complementary campaign was undertaken by Mária Schmidt who was convinced that Soros was the one behind the criticism from U.S. Democrats of her revisionist national fairy tale. She explained briefly to an American journalist in all seriousness that she had seen it on "Saturday Night Live." She said that in 2008 an actor appeared as "George Soros, owner of the Democratic Party" and Soros had never denied it. With that, the case was closed, as far as Schmidt is concerned.
The First Shot
People in Hungary still talk about how Finkelstein and Birnbaum worked for Orbán. Finkelstein is almost a mythic figure in Hungary. Orbán, however, has never commented on Finkelstein's role, and his spokesperson refused to answer questions about it. Birnbaum is the first person involved to speak, here in the "Magazin." He still leaves many questions unanswered. He doesn't want to remember details of their work together, whether slogans or guiding principles were created, or to what extent the campaign was directed.
But what has happened in the ensuing years in Hungary is plain to everyone. And what worldwide consequences flowed from that. In fact, all the campaign had to do was amass all the arguments and measures taken against Soros from East and West, left and right. The new part was simply making Soros the opponent in the election.
The first shot is fired exactly nine months before the next election. An article in the government-friendly newspaper "Heti Válasz" attacks the NGOs as supposedly directed by Soros. First, a picture is publicly drawn of a conspiracy against Hungary that is orchestrated by Soros. Next, there follows a fight by the Hungarian government against the environmental advocacy organization Ökotárs which is said to be controlled by Soros, though Ökotárs received funding from Sweden and Swiss government money in the form of developmental support from DEZA [Direktion für Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit]. Police storm the offices of the alleged Soros lackeys, confiscating computers. Investigations and legal proceedings against Ökotárs go on for months. Swiss money is impounded. Even though in the end the Hungarians find nothing, the picture of a dangerous, interconnected NGO-network has been established.
This is at the time of the war in Syria and the enormous increase in the number of people seeking help in the EU, the so-called refugee crisis. While Finkelstein is sketching out an early campaign against the refugees, Soros publishes an essay in fall 2015 in which he urges adoption of a "common plan" by the EU to deal with the refugees. He says, the EU must reckon with "a million refugees per year in the near future." A tasty morsel for Orbán.
Only days after the Hungarian government is forced to abandon the battle against Ökotárs, Viktor Orbán gives a speech. He says that George Soros is the "agent" of that Western train of thought that seeks to "weaken the national state" and flood it with refugees. Here for the first time, Soros' aid for migrants is cast as part of a large conspiracy.
The attacks come ever more quickly at the end of 2015. Every organization that had ever received funding from the Open Society Foundations is characterized as "controlled by Soros." Finally, employees at the NGOs are tarred as internationally financed "mercenaries."
All of this is achieved through a calculated ping-pong between sensational "revelation" articles and official "reactions" by representatives of the government. The smear campaign becomes increasingly untethered: Hungary copies Putin's move, to withdraw the license from a university in St. Petersburg that Soros is helping to fund. The attacks against Soros' Central European University, which is run by the Canadian Michael Ignatieff, start in February 2017. The respected historian had once been active politically in his homeland in opposition to the Conservative Party, for which Finkelstein worked.
The Embodiment of Evil
The temporary apex of the campaign against Soros is reached in July 2017 when the country is decked in posters that show his face and under it the sentence, "Don't let Soros have the last laugh!" The slogan "Stop Soros" is repeated constantly. Photomontage shows Soros arm in arm with supposed allies, who pass through a fence that has been cut open: Orbán's border fence against the refugees. Orbán claims that Soros supports a mafia network. In fall 2017, the government conducts a "national consultation." Questionnaires are sent to millions of citizens. They can make their mark showing whether or not they support "the Soros plan" to annually settle a million people from Africa and the Near East in Europe.
The Open Society Foundations distributed about $3.6 million in Hungary in 2016. The anti-Soros campaign of 2017 cost over ten times as much, a good €40 million. It was effective. Soros' favorability dropped. An entire country turned against the man. Soros had become the embodiment of evil.
Soros himself fell into the trap. "The more he fought back, the more he gave support to our claim that he was meddling in politics," Birnbaum says. It was unthinkable for the then 87-year-old to step forward as a candidate. "Mr. Soros is not a politician," says his advisor Michael Vachon. Soros was humiliated.
In Soros, Finkelstein had found his ideal opponent. The very "Mr. Liberal" that he wanted. The embodiment of all the contradictions that conservatives detest in economically successful leftists: a financial speculator, who simultaneously advocated for a more compassionate form of capitalism. And best of all: the opponent was not in politics nor even in the country. "The perfect opponent is one that you hit again and again, and he never hits back," says Birnbaum. Even today, he waxes enthusiastic. "It was readymade. It was the simplest of all products. One only had to package and sell it."
The "product" was so good that it sold itself and roamed the world. In 2017 in Italy, fabricated tales of Soros financing refugee boats were circulated. In 2018 in the U.S.A., it was speculated that Soros was behind the caravans of Mexican migrants. In Italy, Matteo Salvini denounced his opponents for taking money from Soros, as did Nigel Farage in the EU Parliament and Stephan Brandner and Jörg Meuthen of the AfD ("Alternative for Germany" Party) in Germany.
Anti-Soros sentiments surface from Columbia to Israel and in Kenya and Australia. A Polish member of parliament called Soros "the most dangerous man in the world." Putin disparaged him during his press conference with Trump in Helsinki. Trump included Soros at the end of 2016 in his closing election advertisement. And more recently he claimed that the demonstrations against his nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, were funded by Soros.
Hungary functioned as the bridgehead in the rhetorical teamwork by Putin and Trump. In Austria, the Soros name surfaced in the election context in connection with the "Silverstein Affair." It later came to light that, among other things, fake Facebook accounts were used to mention Soros' "plans." Right in the middle of the campaign team were Birnbaum and Finkelstein.
The Return of the Evil Jew
Birnbaum defends himself against the suspicion of leading other anti-Soros campaigns outside Hungary. Perhaps he didn't need to. He and Finkelstein had crafted the most powerful image of an enemy for the rightwing movement in modern times—perfect material for the internet. On the one hand, rightwing digital media like "Breitbart" and "Russia Today" took up the Hungarian campaign and translated it into other languages and nourished it with arguments. On the other hand, there are social networks through which the meme of evil George Soros could become a freestanding entity unto itself.
If rightwing movements want to campaign today, they can simply search for Soros material on the net. Anti-Soros is a globalized, freely applicable and adaptable open-source weapon. Birnbaum calls it the "common denominator of the nationalist movement." It is no accident that Steve Bannon drummed up the opposition to Soros when he wanted to become involved in the EU elections.
At this point, one must speak of an aspect of this story that is as strange as it is important: the two Jewish political advisors construct a campaign to target a Jew by using antisemitic slurs.
What Finkelstein and Birnbaum built tapped into one of the oldest antisemitic themes of western history: the evil, greedy Jew who wants to rule the world. Even if Orbán's campaign never used the word Jew: Orbán said he was fighting an "enemy" who was "different" and "without a homeland" and wanted to own the world. Logically, when Jewish stars were graffitied onto the Soros posters, the voters perfected the campaign. An internet search for Soros easily locates a photomontage: Soros' head atop the tentacles of an octopus, a classic anti-Jewish motif.
In 2017, the Jewish community in Hungary protested, and the Italian ambassador became active. When Zoltán Radnóti, a well-known Hungarian rabbi, learned that the campaign was led by two members of the Jewish community, he went public with the shock it produced in hm. The Jewish world is divided whether the campaign is antisemitic. Once, Birnbaum recalls, a member of the Anti-Defamation League in the U.S. had taken him aside and spoken with him. The organization had monitored the growth of antisemitism on the net for years and in a study had devoted a stand-alone chapter to the harassment of Soros.
This question angers Birnbaum, who observes the Sabbath and belongs to numerous Israeli organizations. He says that in the campaign it was a matter of a "purely ideological" project. Soros stood for everything that Orbán was against. "When we planned the campaign, we did not consider for one second that Soros is a Jew." He states that he didn't know himself at the time. He claims that he never works with antisemites. He says that even before starting the collaboration with Orbán, he asked around in knowledgeable circles in Israel about Orbán's position regarding the Jews. He says he didn't hear anything suspicious. To the contrary, Orbán had persecuted antisemitism. He gave his first daughter the Jewish name Rachel. And besides, "Am I not allowed to attack someone because he's a Jew?"
Here one must object, since at that time both election campaign advisors had known the name of Soros for years, and already in the 1980s Finkelstein had been involved in a scandal because he had researched and instrumentalized antisemitic attitudes of the voters for a candidate. This time, the consequences are more dire. The campaign changed the world. From words, a reality came into being.
In the U.S.A., at the end of October, Soros receives a letter bomb from a Trump supporter. Five days later, an armed man storms a synagogue in Pittsburgh and murders eleven people. He saw himself as battling a Jewish conspiracy. On his social media account, he spoke of a "Soros caravan." Confronted with these facts, Birnbaum sounds depressed. "In hindsight, what we did looks crazy, but seen at the time, it was proper."
Only a New Victim
Six months after the meeting in Berlin, Birnbaum extends an invitation to the lounge of the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. A friend is having an opening event: Corey Lewandowski is introducing his Trump book. The presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway looks in; caviar is sold, $100 per ounce. There's dance music, and the waiters are almost all dark-skinned, but the guests almost all White. Birnbaum chats with guests at the invitation-only party and orders Moscow Mules.
Has he changed his opinion about the Soros campaign? "Antisemitism is eternal, something that cannot be extinguished," he answers succinctly. "Our campaign didn't turn anybody into an antisemite who wasn't already one. Perhaps it revealed a new victim. Nothing more. I would still do exactly the same as before."
In December, Ignatieff had to announce the relocation of the university from Budapest to Vienna. The Open Society Foundation moved its principal office to Berlin. Orbán is once again at work, expanding his media empire. At home, as well as in other countries. He has big plans. The European elections are in May. Hungary became a model for the right worldwide. And Orbán has a new form of government, explains a Fidesz insider. Every one of Orbán's moves is "polled" in advance. Politicians don't need a vision anymore but simply mirror what matters to the people. Orbán calls it an "illiberal state."
Arthur Finkelstein died in 2017. Hungary was his final project. In one of his last public speeches, in 2011, he said: "I wanted to change the world. I did that. I made it worse."
