The BBC is to screen a documentary on Sunday night investigating how the Hungarian-born Jewish financier George Soros became a hate figure for the hard right.
The programme will look not only at the Hungarian government’s campaign against him, widely condemned as antisemitic, but also at the bizarre conspiracy theories that have increasingly circulated about him in the USA.
Mr Soros, 89, who studied at the LSE after the Second World War before moving to the States, has used most of an estimated £30 billion fortune for his Open Society Foundations, promoting democracy, education and human rights across the world.
According to Conspiracy Files: the Billionaire Global Mastermind? – which airs on BBC2 at 9pm tonight – some in the American far-right have accused him of instigating the clashes between neo-Nazis and anti-racist demonstrators in Charlottesville two years ago in order to discredit American President Donald Trump.
Robert Bowers, the gunman accused of the Pittsburgh Synaogue Massacre, posted theories on social media that Mr Soros was behind plans for a “white genocide” to replace white people with immigrants.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has alleged that Mr Soros is at the heart of a Jewish conspiracy to “divide” Turkey, while Italy’s former Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has accused him of trying to flood it with immigrants, according to the BBC.
The historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt is quoted as saying that the anti-Soros campaign “terrifies me… That this kind of language is being used is shocking.”
