I could understand the left loathing him more - due to his involvement in the financial sector.
I have a tendency to view him positively because of his support of the concept of the Open Society and his espousal of Popper's political project. I don't know a huge amount about him beyond that but this alone makes me lean towards regarding him as a force for good - even if the idea of billionaires spending money advancing political agendas is deeply troubling on the whole.
It's important to clearly state what is meant when people talk about Soros' "liberal" or "progressive" values: the work I have seen is almost exclusively concerned with the mechanisms of politics, not the content. It is motivated by his experience of seeing both fascism and communism devastating his native country and opposes both extremes. The work I was involved in organised debating competitions for students from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and everything in between and there's nothing "liberal" about it, unless you count allowing women to participate on equal footing as such.
Also it's worth noting that factual statements about Jews can be used in antisemite contexts. For example, "there are so many Jews in Hollywood..." is not incorrect, but it's easy to imagine how that phrase is typically used.
OTOH, unless we're saying Jews in Hollywood, or George Soros, get a free pass just because they happen to be Jewish (assuming Soros even is; I suspect most people who criticise him don't know), then we need to be careful of silencing legitimate criticism by falsely labelling it anti-Semitic.
Read what the leaders and far-right populist movements in Poland and Hungary say about Soros and you can't miss the 'old conspiracies'.
That has nothing to do with how his name is used by online posters as an antisemitic shorthand.
Over the past decades, he has donated his time and money to create the Open Society Foundations with the aim of improving civic society and democracies around the world. The OSF have two dozen programs, ranging from Education Support to Fiscal Governance to Public Health: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/about/programs
One of these programs is the Human Rights Initiative, which has hundreds of projects and focus areas around the world. The scope of projects is as wide as human needs: disability rights, government accountability, etc.
One of these projects is Islamophobia in Europe. The OSF website explains in detail why this is a problem, why there's not enough data about it, and what OSF is doing: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/islamophob...
In France, a NGO called CCIF works in this field: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectif_contre_l%27islamopho...
CCIF has applied and received grants from OSF. It's important to note that CCIF is not otherwise affiliated with OSF or Soros. Thousands of organizations receive grants. CCIF is a recognized non-profit in France.
Within some CCIF subgroup, there are apparently people sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, a large and rather loose transnational organization that promotes an Islamist society (although the Brotherhood claims to be a peaceful organization and condemns all violence).
So, the connection between Soros and the Muslim Brotherhood is filtered through several layers of NGOs and grant boards. The number of grants made by OSF over the years must be in the hundreds of thousands. It's ridiculous to claim that Soros is personally involved in financing Islamism. (As a Finnish taxpayer, I probably have as much involvement in indirectly supporting some Islamist group -- there must be a botched aid project where Finnish money ended up in the hands of Somalian militants, for example. It's just statistics of trying to do long-term good in a very flawed world.)
Or maybe it was because there was nothing to "leak". Seriously, that Open Society was founded by Soros, that it gave a grant to the CCIF and that it funds political initiatives across Europe is not a "leak", it's on their damn website.
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/o...
I took me months to read most Open Society leaks and I personally do not like how they influence the political climate etc.
That's called politics.
> financing Islamists in Europe
Can you back that assertion up with something that doesn't look like pizzagate propaganda?
> buying off members of EU parliament
The doc you link to is just a lobbying firm's work product.