http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110127/ts_yblog_thecutline/fox-news-responds-to-rabbis-calling-for-sanctions-on-glenn-beckFox News has issued a statement on the full-page ad that a coalition of several hundred rabbis took out in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.
The letter, addressed to News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch (see image here), requests that host Glenn Beck "be sanctioned by Fox News for his completely unacceptable attacks on a survivor of the Holocaust" -- philanthropist and financier George Soros -- and that Fox News chief executive "Roger Ailes apologize for his dismissive remarks about rabbis' sensitivity to how the Holocaust is used on the air." (News Corp. owns both Fox News and the Journal.)
In a statement provided to The Cutline, Joel Cheatwood, senior vice president of development for Fox News, said: "We haven't seen the ad, but this group is a George Soros backed left-wing political organization that has been trying to engage Glenn Beck primarily for publicity purposes."The rabbi coalition's letter refers in part to Beck's Nov. 10, 2010 broadcast, part of a three-day series about the liberal billionaire. In that broadcast, Beck said that Soros, who lived apart from his parents in his early teens to avoid being apprehended by the Nazis, "used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. … It was frightening. Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps." Soros, a Hungarian Jew, has spoken publicly about escaping the death camps by posing as a member of a Christian family. His protector's job was to confiscate property from Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary.