JustASC

The ZOA’s Morton Klein defends Glenn Beck, saying it is “deeply chilling” that George Soros did not feel guilt for having accompanied the gentile man who served as his protector during the Holocaust and, as Steve Kroft put it on “60 Minutes,” helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.” (When Soros was a 13-year-old boy, mind you.)

Klein, trained as a biostatistician, is apparantly an amateur psychologist as well. Here’s his diagnosis of Soros:

I, myself, am the son of Holocaust survivors who met in a German Displaced Persons camp, where I was born. I know from personal knowledge that my father, whose parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and all eight siblings were murdered by the Nazis, felt constant pangs of guilt about having survived while his family, friends, Jewish neighbors and Jewish brethren were murdered by the millions. Obviously, he bore no moral responsibility at all but, like other survivors, could not escape feelings of guilt, for being the sole survivor, which haunted and plagued my father to end of his life. As attested to many times by clinicians who have studied Holocaust survivors, it is a normal, understandable reaction of those in such situations. It is deeply chilling that Mr. Soros never felt any grief, horror, or guilt over the loss of so much of his Jewish brethren and comfortably proclaims such.

First of all, Klein has no way of knowing that Soros never felt any “any grief, horror, or guilt over the loss of so much of his Jewish brethren.” Soros was asked a specific question about a specific incident — whether he felt guilt for having accompanied his protector as he catalogued Jewish property for confiscation.

Second of all, it’s the height of chutzpah to declare what another person must feel in the face or aftermath of the unthinkable. You’re 13, you’re taken from your family home and left with a neighbor. Your world is turned upside down, death is everywhere, and you’re afraid you might be next. Oh, and you’re 13.

Beck and Klein are playing a nasty game. Maybe they’d like to cull the testimonies at the Shoah Foundation and single out for ridicule the survivors who don’t feel guilty for what they did to survive.