Impeachment witness casts anti-Soros narrative as modern ‘Protocols’
Former White House official Fiona Hill tells Congress attacks on Jewish philanthropist are new version of anti-Semitic ‘Elders of Zion’ libel
JTA — Fiona Hill, a former White House senior staffer providing key testimony in congressional hearings to impeach President Donald Trump, likened a right-wing narrative casting liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros as all-controlling to a notorious anti-Semitic forgery.
The narrative that Soros is behind an array of evildoings “is the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Hill said Thursday in hearings. “It’s an absolute outrage.”
Soros has become a bugbear for some right-wingers, who blame his liberal philanthropy for a number of ills, citing little evidence. Trump himself last year blamed Soros for an “invasion” of Central American migrants that never materialized.
Hill, in closed testimony last month, had described the attacks as “anti-Semitic” and needing repudiation by Republicans. Her evident frustration and horror at the specious Soros-related attacks on her and colleagues, including the former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, was one of many dramatic moments in the hearings, which wrapped up Thursday.
Hill explained the background to the “Protocols,” a czarist forgery from the late 19th century casting Jews as all-controlling and evil that has been cited multiple times by anti-Semites.
“This is the longest-running anti-Semitic trope that we have in history,” she said.
Hill, who until August was Trump’s senior director for European and Russian affairs, testified in an impeachment query aimed at ascertaining whether Trump solicited a bribe from Ukraine when he asked that government to investigate his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, while he withheld defense assistance from the country for a period.
