Success Quote by George Soros

Soros is doing something rhetorically risky here: he’s trying to draw a straight line between geopolitical power plays and the street-level ugliness of European prejudice, without letting either side off the hook. The opening claim - “a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe” - lands like a cold fact, not a moral panic. Then he pivots to causality, naming the Bush and Sharon administrations as contributors. That’s the provocation: not that American or Israeli policy “causes” hatred in a neat, blame-the-victim way, but that state actions can create the conditions in which old conspiratorial reflexes become socially permissible again.

The careful hedging in the second sentence is the tell. “It’s not specifically anti-Semitism” reads like an attempt to preempt the accusation that he’s excusing bigotry as a rational response to policy. He’s distinguishing between critique of governments (a political category) and animus toward Jews (an ethnic-religious category), while acknowledging how easily the former slides into the latter. “Manifest itself” is soft language for a hard reality: anger looks for a target, and Europe has a well-worn one.

Context matters because Soros isn’t a neutral observer. As a Jewish financier frequently cast in anti-Semitic tropes, he’s both diagnosing and personally inhabiting the phenomenon he describes. The subtext is a warning to elites: when wars and hardline nationalism dominate the news, they don’t just reshape borders; they reshape taboos. And once taboo breaks, prejudice doesn’t stay politely theoretical.