Roger Ailes, the Fox News Channel chief, called National Public Radio executives “Nazis” and said “left-wing rabbis” make it difficult to use the term “Holocaust” on air.
Ailes made the comments in an interview with the Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz, who was canvassing recent controversies about the right-leaning news channel. Ailes hired Juan Williams, a commentator, full time after NPR fired Williams for saying on a Fox News report that he feared seeing Muslims on airplanes.
Williams and NPR long had feuded over Williams’ work on Fox, where he worked as a commentator and tended to express opinions rather than the analytical voice NPR says it expects from its employees.
“They are, of course, Nazis,” Ailes said of NPR executives. “They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda.”
Ailes also commented on the recent controversy involving Fox News commentator Glenn Beck and liberal billionaire George Soros. Beck, citing Soros’ writings and interviews, said several days earlier that Soros as a teenager in Nazi-occupied Hungary had helped send Jews to death camps and had confiscated their properties.
A number of Jewish groups complained in Soros’ defense, saying that Beck was using a survivor’s experience of Nazi oppression to incriminate him in Nazi crimes. But Fox has stood by Beck.
In his writings, Soros has described living as a Christian in order to save his life. In one case, he accompanied his Christian protector to a Jewish-owned property to catalog goods; the owner already had fled. In another, he delivered summonses from the local Jewish council to local Jewish lawyers, but on his father’s advice warned the lawyers to flee as the summonses likely indicated deportation.
Ailes also complained to Kurtz that there are “left-wing rabbis who basically don’t think that anybody can ever use the word ‘Holocaust’ on the air.”
