(JTA) — A Jewish group garnered 10,000 signatures on a petition asking Fox News Channel to fire political commentator Glenn Beck.
Jewish Funds for Justice attempted to deliver the petition on Jan. 13 to the Manhattan headquarters of News Corp., Fox’s parent company, run by Rupert Murdoch. Security would not let JFSJ president Simon Greer into the building, and so he pledged to mail in the petition.
JFSJ has clashed with the talk show provocateur ever since Beck said the term "social justice" leads to Nazism last year. It launched the petition after Beck’s sustained attack on liberal financier George Soros in November, in which Beck suggested without evidence that Soros, a Holocaust survivor, had collaborated with the Nazis.
Also on Jan. 13, Beck delivered another of his interpretations of history that suggest a shadowy attempt to control human thought.
JFSJ and Media Matters, a liberal watchdog, noted that eight of the nine villains in Beck’s analysis, including Soros and Sigmund Freud, were Jewish.
"We are disturbed that by his increasingly focus on attacking Jews and find it hard to believe that it was only coincidence that eight of the nine individuals on his list alleging a shadowy alliance to control the Americans through propaganda were Jewish," JFSJ said in a statement.
A number of conservative Jewish groups have defended Beck, saying that there is no evidence that the attacks on Soros and others have anything to do with the targets’ Jewishness and noting Beck’s strong support for Israel.
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