Identity, Mishegas

I'm sure Wiesel will take it all back now

In a bizarre attack, a well-known author and Holocaust scholar was dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator by an apparent Holocaust denier who reportedly had been trailing him for weeks.
In a posting Tuesday on the anti-Zionist Web site ZioPedia, a writer using the name Eric Hunt takes credit for the attack: “After ensuring no women would be traumatized by what I had to do (I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks), I stopped the elevator at the sixth floor. I pulled Wiesel out of the elevator. I said I wanted to interview him.”
Wiesel grabbed at his chest and yelled for help, according to the posting. “I told him, ‘Why don’t you want people to know the truth?’ His expression changed, and he began screaming again. …” the posting reads.Police reported that the suspect tried to force Wiesel into one of the rooms, but ran away when Wiesel started yelling.
The online posting states that the writer intended to “bring Wiesel to my hotel room where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, Night, is almost entirely fictitious.” Later in the posting, the Holocaust is portrayed as a “myth.”

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11 thoughts on “I'm sure Wiesel will take it all back now

  1. Christopher Hitchens has also lambasted Wiesel, calling him a “contemptible poseur and windbag.” Writing in The Nation, Hitchens wrote that Wiesel was indifferent to the killing by Lebanese Christian militiamen of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila, commenting that in “1982, after Gen. Ariel Sharon had treated the inhabitants of the Sabra and Shatila camps as target practice for his paid proxies, Wiesel favored us with another of his exercises in neutrality. Asked by the New York Times to comment on the incident, he was one of the few American Jews approached on the matter to express zero remorse. ‘I don’t think we should even comment,’ he said, proceeding to comment bleatingly that he felt ‘sadness–with Israel, and not against Israel.’ For the victims, not even a perfunctory word.”
    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010219/hitchens

  2. “anti-zionist web site Ziopedia” er, try full-blown anti-Semitic instead of “anti-Zionist”:
    http://www.jews-anonymous.org/
    Press Release: Rebel Media Group announces ‘Jews Anonymous’
    Sydney, 18 January 2007 – Sydney based Rebel Media Group, the non-profit organisation behind dissident blog and online encyclopedia ZioPedia.org, today announced the foundation of ‘Jews Anonymous’ (J.A,), a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other. According to Andrew Winkler, CEO and Chairman of the Rebel Media Group, the only requirement for membership with ‘Jews Anonymous’ is a desire to stop being a Jew. “The primary purpose of J.A. is to help Jews to rid themselves of any sense of chosenness and superiority over their fellow human beings and embrace all of mankind, regardless of heritage, nationality, religion or race.”
    Asked about detailed plans for ‘Jews Anonymous’, Andrew said, “I am going to stick as closely as possible to the successful model of ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’. The biggest challenge for both Jews and alcoholics is the realisation that they have a problem. They need to overcome the ‘river of denial’ and need the help of others to recover from their condition and solve their common problem.”

  3. I actually emailed this story to Moebius earlier.
    We have reached a point, I feel, where the language of conflict has lost all nuance. Anti-Zionist has become sort of a comfortable buzzword for anyone with an axe to grind, and Israel a wonderful red herring for ongoing Judeophobia.

  4. i’m glad this is happening now during the right-left split.
    this creates an opportune moment for dissecting the issue:
    what is legitimate and illegitimate critique and discourse in relation to the israeli-palestinian conflict and american jewish lobbying efforts

  5. …a 78-yr old man being assaulted shouldn’t be considered an ‘opportunity’ in any sense of the word.
    Pick and choose your battles, Mobius.
    The tone is inappropriate – and reads as sort of cold and opportunistic. And a little revolting.

  6. i apologize if that sounded callous, monk–elie wiesel is a close friend of my family’s and as soon as i found out i called home to see how he was.
    nonetheless, when a holocaust denier claiming to be an anti-zionist makes headlines, it creates a prescient moment for thrusting this conversation out in the open.
    this man singlehandedly provides the jewish right with every drop of ammunition they need to indict anti-zionism as antisemitic. now is the time to sort this mess out.

  7. Calling ZioPedia “antizionist” is a conflation of antizionism with plain old antisemitism. They have articles on ‘why there is no such thing as a good Jew’, for Pete’s sake!

  8. anti-Zionism means that you oppose the notion that Israel’s existence is the answer to ‘the Jewish problem’ of diasporic existence and ambiguous nation status. That’s all.
    Millions of Jews are in fact anti-Zionist. We can discuss the misuse of the term – and that’s a worthwhile conversation – but let’s ground ourselves in the factual definitions first.
    A large number of Israeli Jews are anti-Zionist, including the half million or so who left Israel to settle elsewhere. (file under: actions speak louder than words.)

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