It’s simply astonishing to me that so many Jewish leaders are perfectly willing to cozy up to the likes of Hagee even after it has become so patently clear that his views are way off the rails.
You wouldn’t take $10,000 to give a speech at a Hagee event?

As every day passes there is more information leaking out that the participants in the Goldstone report were fabricating and outright lying about what really took place in Gaza. The latest being Travers the so-called military expert. He now suggests that all of the IDF photos were doctored and that the Jewish lobby in England is the reason for support of Israel. The man is a known bigot. Goldstone may have been respected for some of his previous U.N. reports but this one is pure hysteria and fantasy. He does win the extreme left wing award for the “fool on the hill”.

Posts like this make me think that sometimes bloggers could do with a little humility in their pronouncements on the integrity of other human beings.
“As far as I’m concerned, Justice Richard Goldstone is precisely the kind of courageous Jewish moral hero that Wiesel himself purports to be: someone committed to advocating for universal human rights even when doing so might mean holding our own community painfully to account.”
I would hope most of us are mature enough to avoid hero worship.

When Israel is not too stellar on human rights and you continue to advocate for both, then there is a contradiction. Simple. You support human right except for this one case.

“Not too stellar” by whose measure exactly…? The former commander of UK forces in Afghanistan says that Israel did more to safeguard civilian life than any military in history. But hey, what does he know about fighting an asymmetric enemy anyway?
Israel’s human rights record is far superior to Western states who’ve faced far less trying circumstances. Elie Wiesel is advocating for two compatible (indeed semi-interchangeable) goals.
I hadn’t known that Hagee and/or Landau ‘advocate for mass murder’. Somebody should call the media.
(And if I had to guess I’d say Wiesel was thinking “Sheesh! How cool is it that a Christian pastor, an Israeli politician and a Hungarian-American Jew can all agree on the importance of supporting the security of the Jewish state?!! One hell of a change from the 1940s!”)

“Elie Wiesel has long walked the tightrope between pious pronouncements of universal Jewish conscience and unabashed political advocacy.”
All politicans of all countries engage in machiavellian tactics. Denying that they do is part of the machiavellianism(is that a word?). G-d bless Elie Wiesel for doing the same for Israel.

What exactly is “horrific” about appearing in public with a man who constantly goes out on a limb to support Jews and the Jewish state??
“Vicious anti-Jewish claims” from a man who takes every opportunity he can to speak on behalf of Jews and tells his congregants of their religious and moral obligations to support the Jewish people?
Your dislike of his theology isn’t enough to conceal those real-world facts.

lol at this guy trying to school me on Zionist history (and citing Lenni Brenner no less). groundbreaking internet research, Justin! son: you’re talking to someone who has probably *forgotten* more than you will ever know on this topic.
but that’s not the point I wish to make here.
“communication” or “negotiation” or — if you wanna get real Norm Finkelstein (or Lenni Brenner) with it, “collaboration” — DOES NOT = “support.”
take a deep breath and listen to what I’m about to say: Words have meaning.
you have suggested that the Zionists “supported” the Nazis. your comment was ignorant and offensive. you *might* get a pass if English is your third or fourth language. if not, you need to recognize that you’ve made a mistake, quietly apologize for what you wrote, and kindly back out of this comment thread.

is that major players in the zionist movement were completely blinded by their desires to fulfill their political visions, and in doing so endangered european jews
@Justin. Wasn’t a Zionist-Nazi 1930’s deal something like: the Zionists paid the Nazis a bunch of money and, resultantly, 60,000 Jews escaped Europe for Israel? Would it have been better to let those 60,000 people die? Or, were the Zionists supposed to invade Berlin?
Similarly, Eli Weisel lost a fortune in the Madoff affair. Do we not expect him to make half-a-million dollars in one speech to Hagee’s group? (It’s not a perfect analogy for the reason that Hagee is not Hitler, and we live in 2010 and not 1933).

Probably not one, frankly (unless we think that the Nazi war effort/extermination plans hinged on a few million dollars in the 1930’s).
Let’s put it another way, though. Wasn’t there a case in one of the European ghettos (maybe the scholar rs can help us, because I can’t remember all of the details) where there were two leaders of a certain Jewish community? Once it became clear that the Nazis were determine to wipe out the Jews, one of those leaders committed suicide, and the other began working with the Nazis and helping them deport Jews to the death camps. But, at the same time, he was also working to secretly save Jews. As a result, many survived the Holocaust because of the collaborator.
Which leader took the better path?

You don’t think you’re stepping even a little bit into crackpot territory with this stuff?
See here
and here.
The Zionists (of all colors) were not drying to kill the Jews of Europe, heaven forbid, but did not find negotiations with the Nazis anathema, as well as getting them all to Palestine. “Never let a crisis go to waste”

If you can find me 51 documents that show that Zionist organizations actively sought to fight the Nazis and their rise to power, well, let’s talk.
Sadly, this is an apparently serious request on your part. I’ll try to talk you through this one. Avowed anti-Zionist Brenner has cherry-picked 51 documents that relate to Zionist dealings with the Nazis (dealings that, as Jonathan1 correctly points out — and which is fairly freaking obvious –, were directed wholly and entirely at saving Jews from certain death in Europe).
Here’s where your and Amit’s ears perk up: “A-HA! The Zionist leadership was NOT interested in saving Jews from certain death in Europe, but merely in bringing able-bodied Jews to Palestine to build a state!”
….which of course would ultimately save them from certain death in Europe. Given the near ZERO effort being made by the rest of the world to get Jews out of Europe to anywhere, I will refrain from impugning the motives of the Zionist leadership here. They saved a bunch of Jews, and in doing so did about a million times more than most of the rest of the world. To consider this an act of “support” for the Nazis is pretty ridiculous.
Furthermore no serious scholar (nor me) would bother playing Zionist-Nazi tit-for-tat with wacko Brenner on this point, for the simple fact that the entire Zionist movement aimed ultimately at saving Jews from what the Zionist leadership saw as eventual certain death in Europe! (Again you are free to disagree on this point, but Zionist thinkers from Graetz to Ben-Gurion cited the physical danger to Jews in Europe – in addition to their cultural decay there – as main reasons for the Zionist enterprise.)
In this light, coming up with 51 documents showing that the Zionists opposed the Nazis seems a pretty silly exercise. (I suppose I could for argument’s sake select at random any number of letters of Ben-Gurion’s or Weizman’s to heads of state between the years of 1933 and 1942, the Statement by the Jewish Agency for Palestine in reaction to the White Paper, the Biltmore Declaration, countless memoranda of the Jewish Agency during the war years, any number of official resolutions from the World Zionist Congresses between the years 1933 and 1939 etc. etc. etc….but I sense that these would be insufficient to overcome the enormous burden of proof established by…Justin and Lenni Brenner.)
And dude: Zionists did not “endanger european jews.” THE NAZIS endangered european Jews. Zionist efforts at saving European Jews were (at worst) feeble, ineffectual, and lethargic or (at best) of very limited success in bringing about the rescue of several thousands of Jews (yes — in exchange for *GASP!* financial incentives for the Nazis. I know it’s bizarre that the Jew-killing Nazis weren’t willing to let a group of Jews save another group of Jews absent some sort of payoff; what were they thinking?).
Brenner’s — and your — attempts to paint these Zionist-Nazi dealings as anything other than desperate wartime expediency are nothing if not politically motivated: you begin from a position of anti-Zionism, and are more than happy to add to the Zionist indictment this dubious charge of Nazi collaboration. A dispassionate assessment of the facts as they actually transpired it is not. (I always marvel at the enormous demands that the Brenners and Finkelsteins and Justins of the world NOW make of the wartime Zionist movement, as if a stateless NGO such as the Jewish Agency didn’t do enough to halt one of the most powerful and technologically advanced nation-states the world had ever known, while the industrialized nations of the world and their vast mechanized armies stood idly by.)
I fear ultimately that the premises of our debate are not the same (and I don’t mean that you take for granted the evilness of Jewish nationalism and I do not). What I mean is that the levels of our arguments are off. You (and now Amit) consider your charges of Nazi-Zionist collusion to be bold and provocative, serving bravely to shed light on (yet another) shameful episode in Zionist history for the ignorant rootlesscosmos and Jonathan1s of the world. And in this light it must seem to you (and Amit) sufficient for the sake of your “argument” simply to link to a Wikipedia entry, at which point I am presumably to read about said episode, shocked and ashamed at suddenly seeing the core foundations of my Zionist upbringing eroded by these unpleasant new revelations, only to bury my head and slink back into a corner, defeated. Simply raising these points (rather than seriously debating them)is sufficient for the sake of your argument, since you take for granted that I’ve never considered them in the first place. “Here’s a Wikipedia entry. Done.”
What you don’t seem to understand is that I already happen to know about Jews for Trucks, I already know about Naftali Lubinchik, I already know about the Kastner affair and I already know about Lenni Brenner and his entire schtick. So you can save your Wiki entries; I assure you I have seen (and very likely edited) them before.
And yet, lo-and-behold, after reading all of this over the course of many years, I *STILL* consider your assertion that the “Zionists supported the Nazis” to be utterly and completely ignorant and offensive.
And you’ve presented exactly nothing to convince me otherwise (other than to twist the definition of “support” to better suit your original assertion).
[And if we must address said strained definition (…an entity that does not oppose another whose motives and goals are ultimately at odds with itself…well, that’s support in my book.): Suffice it to point out that by your definition all Jews who failed to “oppose” the Nazis (that is, the vast majority of the 6 million) supported the Nazis.]
[On a side note, you seem embittered by our exchanges on here. I actually enjoy them. Each subsequent conversation serves to give a fuller picture of your worldview. You’ve previously blamed the Zionists for your getting ridiculed in schul and for declining world bee populations (http://jewschool.com/2009/12/28/19767/a-hill-of-beans-in-this-crazy-world/). And now we see that your favored historical narrative of Zionist-Nazi relations is based on the work of Lenni Brenner. And finally, you seem to believe earnestly that the “Zionists supported the Nazis.” These are essential bits of context for anything you may have to say in the future about Zionism or Israel.]
As for carrying on an “adult conversation,” my score-keeping goes like this: I called you “son.” You called me an “ass” and a “douchebag.” You do the math.