There has been a lot of criticism of George Soros on COMMENTARY’s blog. The financier has bankrolled a great many left-wing groups and candidates. He wrongly views the United States, his adopted country, as “the main obstacle to a stable and just world order.” His ambivalence toward the state of Israel is also well-known. Indeed, despite the fact that he is well-known for his philanthropy, the only Jewish cause this Hungarian-born Jew is associated with is J Street, the left-wing lobbying group that seeks to build support for crippling American pressure on Israel. Throw in a career filled with tawdry episodes of currency manipulation and insider trading, and it isn’t a pretty picture.

But even George Soros does not deserve some of the opprobrium heaped upon him by Glenn Beck this week. Beck has devoted much of his TV and radio programs in the past few days to detailing Soros’s sins. But instead of sticking to the issues and rightly flaying him for the stands he has taken and the bad causes he supports, Beck painted him as a teenage Nazi collaborator on his Nov. 10 show.

On the broadcast, he spoke of Soros’s activities during the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944 and described him as participating in the rounding up of Jews. “Here’s a Jewish boy sending Jews to the death camps,” said Beck. While Beck added that Soros’s age and the circumstances should be taken into account and said that even he didn’t know what he would do had he been there, the clear implication was that Soros was a collaborator who should feel remorse.

But whatever actually happened, as even Beck stated, Soros was just “surviving” an impossible situation, and it is simply inadmissible for anyone to speak in a judgmental fashion about his conduct or to demand “remorse.” Beck is no position to pontificate about the conduct of Holocaust survivors and should refrain from even commenting about this subject. In fact, Soros has himself discussed his experiences openly, and most of what we know about this comes directly from him. Throwing these events in his face is, as Anti-Defamation League National Director Abe Foxman stated, “completely inappropriate, offensive and over the top.” Such topics really must be off-limits, even in the take-no-prisoners world of contemporary punditry.

Beck has become a radio and television phenomenon whose ability to tap into people’s fears and suspicions about media and political elites has made him a star. But as the Nov. 10 broadcast in question shows, his willingness to wade into subjects about which he knows little makes him appear both silly and ill-intentioned. When discussing Soros’s father’s belief in Esperanto, a pre-World War II movement that sought to create a worldwide language and universal government (which Beck incorrectly called “Esperanza”), he made it sound like this bunch of ineffectual do-gooder pacifists was a coequal threat to freedom with Communism and the Nazis. Their idea was foolish, but to treat them as if they belonged to an international conspiracy reflects a lack of context and knowledge about the era.

Similarly, when Beck played a recording of Soros speaking of his efforts to undermine various governments, his listeners had to assume that it was part of some leftist conspiracy that he was funding. Beck left out the fact that what Soros was talking about was his Cold War-era funding of movements that sought to support anti-Communist dissidents in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union. In other words, while Soros’s current politics is abhorrent, he was one of the good guys when it came to the fight against Soviet Communism.

Political commentary that reduces every person and every thing to pure black and white may be entertaining, but it is often misleading. There is much to criticize about George Soros’s career, and his current political activities are troubling. But Beck’s denunciation of him is marred by ignorance and offensive innuendo. Instead of providing sharp insight into a shady character, all Beck has done is further muddy the waters and undermine his own credibility as a commentator.