Ross complains that the Jakarta Post newspaper is too left wing.

Jakarta Pest- Time to Move On?

Last Tuesday the Jakarta Post granted a large area of its centre spread to George Soros, the plutocrat whose wealth has lately been devoted to the advance of cultural marxism in America and, ipso facto, throughout the world.

His diatribe went after all the usual boogie-men and boogie-institutions hated by left-liberals, e.g. President Bush, V-P Cheney, the ‘ex-Trotskyite’ David Horowitz and of course Fox News. The latter’s sin, in Soros’ book, is apparently to describe itself as ‘fair and balanced.’

Mr. Horowitz got included in the spray of animosity, presumably, because he wrote a book called ‘The Shadow Party,’ about Soros and his pet project, MoveOn.org (well worth a read – sample quote.

Now it’s our party! We bought it, we own it!

MoveOn.org leader leftist Eli Pariser referring to the Democratic Party, following the 2004 elections, when billionaires- chief among them Soros, contributed more than $300 million to liberal candidates and groups)

I can also offer an alternative perspective on Soros from an article in Accuracy In Media An “Extremely Evil Person” by Cliff Kincaid, October 3, 2006. aim

Speaking at a Washington symposium on the continuing threat posed by illegal drugs to American society, Calvina Fay of the Drug Free America Foundation declared billionaire George Soros to be an “extremely evil person” who wants to legalize dangerous mind-altering drugs. ,,. an atheist who is a major funder of the Democratic Party and liberal-left causes, is “our common enemy” and that he is determined to subvert traditional values and undermine America’s families.

Soros, convicted of insider trading in France, is a financial speculator and hedge fund operator who manipulates the currencies of the nations of the world in order to make himself rich. Some of his fortune, estimated at $7 billion, has been put into causes such as abortion rights, gay rights, drug legalization, voting rights for felons, euthanasia, and rights for immigrants and prostitutes. His Open Society Institute even helped underwrite attorney Lynne Stewart, subsequently convicted of helping terrorists. In 2004, he spent more than $20 million in an unsuccessful effort to defeat President Bush for re-election.

In an appearance at the same anti-drug event, Marc Wheat, staff director and chief counsel of the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, described Soros as someone who seems to have no sense of guilt or responsibility for his actions. He noted that, during a December 20, 1998, interview with 60 Minutes, Soros acknowledged that as a 14-year-old Jewish boy in Hungary , his identity was protected and that he actually assisted in confiscating property from Jews as they were being shipped off to death camps. Asked by interviewer Steve Kroft if he had any sense of guilt over what he did, Soros replied, “No.”

In the interview, Soros went on to compare his predicament at the time to the operation of economic markets, saying, “”¦if I weren’t there, of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would-would-would be taking it away anyhow.” Soros then insisted he was only a “spectator” and had “no role in taking away that property.” That is why, he said, “I had no sense of guilt.”

No uncritical admirer of either the incumbent American President or his deputy, ( I’m not American, by the way) I certainly give them more respect than a character like Soros.

I should say that I also have my doubts about the motivations of Rupert Murdoch (hard to like a guy who surrenders his nationality for a chance to make more money), but have some esteem for his business acumen. His Fox slogan was cleverly devised to win viewers from the mainstream American media, which are grossly biased to the left of centre and has been for a long time.

Murdoch himself has been carefully repositioning his stable of outlets, with his New York Post endorsing Hitlery Clinton, so let’s reserve judgement on how ‘fair and balanced’ his employees remain. One should not forget his sly style in the UK, where the Sunday Times took side-swipes at the Royal Family but held back from outright republicanism for fear of losing thousands of loyalist readers while his Economist (a much smaller circulation magazine) openly articulated his gut anti-monarchy sentiments.

But it was almost laughable to see the Soros put-down of Fox’s claims to objectivity in a publication so slanted as the JP.
With The Point surely doomed to extinction due to its owners’ inability or unwillingness to hire writers with a fluent command of English, we are stuck with the JP as our only English-language daily, and you’d think its proprietors would accept that this presents them with some responsibility to afford all sections of expat opinion an approximation of equal access.

Far from it. Their sense of news value is all too often subordinated to their ideological proclivities, such as their constant reports harping on about the ‘poor victims,’ aka PKI communist totalitarians, who suffered so much in 1965; (no doubt many did suffer, but some of them assuredly deserved to, and the JP’s editorial columns not so long ago contained a eulogy to the despotic Ho Chi Minh, with no sense of shame evident at excluding all mention of the murder and cruelty dispensed by Vietnam’s Communist Party dictatorship – victims of communism do not merit the same sympathy as reds who reap the whirlwind of their class-hate creed!

Again, news took second place to JP prejudice with the huge front-page coverage given to the Q-Fest, a deviant film festival, (subsidized by a foreign NGO) with almost contemporaneous propaganda articles, a fulsome report on the vapourings of some Malaysian ‘Adjunct Professor of Gender Studies’ ( is that a real subject?) on how her fellow-countrymen (or ‘-persons?!?’ ) should embrace cohabiting deviants by legalizing so-called ‘gay marriage.’

Then there was the feminist (though admittedly cute) ranter Julia Suryakusuma, whose subsequent ‘opinion’ piece (12th September) was studded with pro-deviant factoids and a grossly offensive reference to (of course unidentified) pesantren – Islamic boarding schools – as hotbeds of sodomy. If Al Qidayeh gets it in the neck for defaming Islam, what about smearing Muslim schools? Name and shame, sweet Julia, or is that too much like honest journalism?

Another example of the JP bias was the lengthy article by an Australian Labor Party front-bench spokesman, whose comments were not balanced by any similar guest-writer invited from the Howard Government’s parliamentary benches.

There was also an expat Australian’s anti-monarchist article, simmering with resentment against Australia’s beautiful and popular flag. True, a letter was published from an Australian royalist critic, but a small patch of the space allotted to reader’s letters does not carry the same weight as a featured article. Some of us won’t soil our valuable typing energy sending in rebuttals knowing at best they’ll be consigned to a lowly corner, in contrast to the limelight bestown on the sinister (I use the word in its Latin meaning) outpourings of the JP’s lefty darlings.

Perhaps if we stop buying it, the lefties in charge may get the message and move on from their callow ‘Sixties radical’ stance. They do publish material that is non-partisan, but what about some items to appeal to those many of us who are right of centre? A rare hiccup in their politically correctness occurred not long ago, with an academic allowed to express concern at the suppression of those who refute the current ‘global-warming‘ hysteria. Was this mere tokenism or a reaction to the risk of losing readers to The Point, a risk that is regrettably receding as that paper refrains from making the most of a golden opportunity?

Unfortunately, the big money, to start a coherent alternative paper with an objective mission, does not seem to exist here. This reflects the situation in America, where the wealthiest elements, super-rich dynasties like the Kennedys and the Heinz-Kerry and Gore family fortunes, have taken sides against the wong cilik, the little folk, whose values they despise. Soros, with his billions, exemplifies this divorce of those who have prospered indecently (worse in his case because he made a deliberate choice to be part of America and now seeks to tear it down) and then turned their riches into political weaponry. It is only fitting that the Havana, sorry, Jakarta Post, should give an ersatz American’s anti-Americanism such star billing.