NEW YORK — The global AFP news agency published an article claiming that “rights groups” on Friday “slammed” a national survey being conducted by the Hungarian government about billionaire George Soros and what Budapest describes as Soros’s plan for hundreds of thousands of foreign migrants per year to flood Europe.
AFP failed to inform readers that the only two “rights groups” cited in its article attacking the Soros questionnaire are themselves massively financed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
“Rights groups slam new Hungary ‘hate campaign,’” was the title of the Yahoo! News version of the article.
“Rights groups slam new Hungary ‘hate campaign’ against Soros,” was the title of the Times of Israel version.
News media outlets may chose their own titles for wire stories, but run the AFP version of the story text.
AFP reported:
Rights groups slammed on Friday Hungary’s new “national consultation” targeting George Soros and what Budapest says is the billionaire philanthropist’s intention to flood Europe with a million migrants per year.
The campaign, accompanied by a blitz of billboards and TV adverts, will from Sunday see the government send households questionnaires seeking opinions on this “Soros Plan.”
The so-called Soros Plan refers to a 2015 opinion piece the billionaire wrote for Foreign Policy magazine in which he advocated a seven-point course of action to deal with the migrant crisis. He advocated that the European Union make a “commitment to admit even just 300,000 refugees each year” and called for the EO to designate at least 30 billion euros per year to the effort.
AFP reported that the questionnaire inquires whether Hungarians support Soros ideas such as, in the language of one of the surveys, proposals to “dismantle (EU) border fences” and enact “milder criminal sentences” for illegal migrants.
One survey accuses Soros of working to “push the languages and cultures of Europe into the background” and “severely punish” any country that opposes mass migration amid the ongoing crisis.
AFP went on to cite exactly two so-called “rights” groups opposing the Soros survey – Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International:
Human Rights Watch said that the Hungarian government’s claims in its new “hate campaign” are “a very distorted half-truth, as Brussels is asking EU governments to resettle only 50,000 refugees over two years.”
The campaign will likely fuel a “hostile climate for civil society driven by campaigns to smear real and perceived government critics” and is to distract voters ahead of 2018 elections, HRW said.
Amnesty International’s Hungary director Julia Ivan called the campaign, which follows a similar one earlier this year, “absolutely absurd and unbelievable.”
AFP failed to inform readers of the massive Soros financing to both groups.
Discovering the Soros financing does not require serious investigative skills. AFP simply needed to type the keywords “Human Rights Watch” and “Open Society” into the Google search engine to find that the first page that comes up is a September 2010 Human Rights Watch press release posted on the group’s own website titled, “George Soros to Give $100 Million to Human Rights Watch.”
The press release touts the 10-year, $100 million grant as “the largest that he (Soros) has ever made to a nongovernmental organization.”
Similarly, typing “Amnesty International” and “Open Society” into the Google search engine brings up Open Society’s webpages documenting numerous major Soros grants to Amnesty International.
Breitbart News has featured a large number of stories documenting Soros’s financing of groups pushing open borders in Europe and worldwide, with specific focus on the use of the migrant crisis to achieve policy aims.
In the U.S., Soros has been tied to advocacy for illegal aliens, opposition to immigration enforcement and, most recently, to activist groups attempting to halt President Trump’s domestic agenda.
Reviews by this reporter of the more than 2,500 documents hacked from the servers of Soros’s Open Society Foundations highlight the undue influence the billionaire financier exerts domestically, from attempting to remake the American electorate to successfully lobbying for changes in U.S. immigration policy to funding initiatives targeting local police forces.
While many of the documents spotlight Soros’s global network, focus on the hacked materials from his foundations’ U.S. contingent begins to expose the many tentacles of the Democratic party mega-donor’s operation and its deep impact on the policy objectives of the former administration of Barack Obama, often using a slew of U.S.-based progressive groups and activist organizations.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.