George Soros
George SorosReuters

The son of Jewish billionaire George Soros said a bomb placed in the mailbox of his father’s home, as well as explosive devices sent to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, are not “divorced” from the anti-Semitism he said has emerged from President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

“While the responsibility lies with the individual or individuals who sent these lethal devices to my family home and Mr. Obama’s and Ms. Clinton’s offices, I cannot see it divorced from the new normal of political demonization that plagues us today,” Alexander Soros wrote in The New York Times.

Explosive devices were sent this week to Soros, former President Barack Obama, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Obama-era attorney general Eric Holder and the New York office of CNN. Each had as the return address a Florida office of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schutz, the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, who is Jewish. The Holder package was misaddressed and returned to Wasserman Schultz’s office, which police evacuated. None of the devices has exploded or caused injury.

Trump administration officials, including the president, have condemned the attempted attacks.

The younger Soros in the op-ed said his father’s liberal and political philanthropy was inspired by his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Until Trump’s 2016 campaign, he said, his father suffered anti-Semitic attacks, but only on the fringes.

“Mr. Trump’s final TV ad famously featured my father; Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve; and Lloyd Blankfein, chairman of Goldman Sachs — all of them Jewish — amid dog-whistle language about ‘special interests’ and ‘global special interests’,” he wrote. “A genie was let out of the bottle, which may take generations to put back in, and it wasn’t confined to the United States.”

At the time of the ad, a number of Jewish groups condemned what they said were its anti-Semitic insinuations..