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Home > It Is Important to Have Perspective on Elie Wiesel's Legacy
________________________________________
It Is Important to Have Perspective on Elie Wiesel's Legacy
By Max Blumenthal [1] / AlterNet [2]
July 5, 2016
The news of Elie Wiesel's death in the early morning of July 2 ushered in
veneration and reflections from figures across the political spectrum, from
Bill Clinton [3] and Donald Trump [4] to Benjamin Netanyahu [5] and George
W. Bush [6]. The outpouring of high-level praise aimed at consolidating
Wiesel as the eternal voice of the Holocaust and the central preceptor of
its lessons. Those who criticized his legacy or pointed out his moral
contradictions, meanwhile, were ferociously attacked by the forces he helped
inspire.
Back when I was in junior high school, the rabbi of my family's synagogue
urged me to read Wiesel's book Night as part of my Bar Mitzvah preparations.
The story offered a look at the existence of Jews deported to Auschwitz and
Buchenwald that was as harrowing as it was accessible. Reading Night while
studying a Torah portion that chronicled Israelite captivity in ancient
Egypt helped cement the Holocaust as a central component of my Jewish
identity. Countless other Jews my age experienced Wiesel's work in a similar
fashion and many came to idolize him. Like me, few of them knew much about
the man beyond the tribulation he endured in Hitler's death camps.
Though my experience was particular to American Jewish life, the general
public has been familiarized with Wiesel over the course of several
generations through educational curricula [7] and an expansive commercial
apparatus. In 2006, after Oprah Winfrey's embarrassing promotion of James
Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, which turned out to be a
fabrication, her book club made Night its monthly selection. The public
relations maneuver drove the book onto the national bestseller list and
centered its author in the celebrity limelight. Soon after, Oprah joined
Wiesel on a tour of Auschwitz [8], where he spoke before a camera crew in
mystical terms about the souls of those were exterminated and how he
communed with them as he stepped across the hallowed ground.
Through Oprah, Wiesel secured his brand as the high priest of Holocaust
theology, the quasi-religion he introduced some 30 years earlier in a New
York Times op-ed: "The Holocaust [is] the ultimate event," he insisted, "the
ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted. Only those who
were there know what it was; the others will never know."
Reflecting on the impact of Wiesel's work, Brooklyn College political
science professor Corey Robin wrote [9] that he had "turn[ed] the Holocaust
into an industry of middlebrow morality and manipulative sentimentality"
while sacralizing "the ovens [as] our burning bush." For the masses of
Jewish Americans who subscribed to Wiesel's secular theology, he was a
post-war Moses who interceded between the Western world and a catastrophe
that substituted for a merciful God.
While Wiesel leveraged his literary talents to win sympathy for Jewish
victims of genocide, he sought to limit the narratives of other groups
subjected to industrial-level extermination. As a member of the advisory
council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1992, he lobbied against
recognizing LGBTQ and Roma victims of the Holocaust. A decade earlier, when
the Israeli Foreign Ministry demanded Wiesel exclude Armenian scholars from
a conference on genocide, fearing damage to the country's relations with
Turkey, he resigned [10] from his position as chair rather than defend the
scholars. (It was not until 2008 that Wiesel called the massacre of
Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide.)
Wiesel seemed to view these other victimized groups as competitors in an
oppression Olympics, fretting that widespread recognition of the atrocities
they suffered would sap his own moral power. The universalist's credo-"Never
again to anyone [11]"-was a threat to his saintly status, his celebrity and
his bottom line.
Defending Israel, crimes and all
By popularizing an understanding of the Holocaust as a unique event that
existed outside of history, Wiesel helped cast Jews as history's ultimate
victims. In turn, he fueled support for the walled-in Spartan state that was
supposed to represent their deliverance, and defended everything it said it
had to do for their security. "My loyalty to my people, to our people, and
to Israel comes first and prevents me from saying anything critical of
Israel outside Israel," Wiesel wrote.
In the face of increasingly unspeakable crimes against Palestinians, Wiesel
counseled silence. "I must identify with whatever Israel does-even with her
errors," he declared.
Wiesel's unwavering commitment to Israel undoubtedly influenced his vocal
support for President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. "We have a moral
obligation to intervene where evil is in control. Today, that place is
Iraq," he proclaimed in a 2003 op-ed [12]. He went on to demand
American-orchestrated regime change in Syria [13], Libya [14] and Iran. "To
be Jewish in this world is to always be concerned," he told [15] an audience
on Capitol Hill, endorsing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's push
for a U.S. attack on Iran. Wiesel's support for successive assaults on
Middle Eastern countries-always on the grounds of defeating "evil"-made him
a key asset of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists alike.
Since 9/11, Wiesel's figure has helped keep America's imperial designs
safely shrouded in the ghosts of Buchenwald and Babi Yar. As the literary
critic Adam Shatz wrote [16], "the author of Night has gone from being a
great victim of war crimes to being an apologist for those who commit
them-all while invoking his moral authority as a survivor." Even after the
invasions Wiesel advocated for spurred the deaths of some 100,000 Iraqi
civilians and the rise of ISIS, his aura remained intact, keeping him
insulated from accountability.
Embracing hustlers and demonizing Palestinians
When federal authorities busted Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme in 2008,
Wiesel lost the millions he had amassed through his career as writer and
lecturer on the Holocaust. To recoup his losses, he turned to the furthest
shores of the American right-wing, forging mutually beneficial relationships
with a coterie of pro-Israel hate preachers and hustlers.
Just months after losing his investments with Madoff, Wiesel accepted
$500,000 [17] from Pastor John Hagee for a single speech. Addressing Hagee's
congregation in San Antonio, Texas, Wiesel heaped praise on the Christian
Zionist preacher who once described [18] Hitler as a "half-breed Jew," then
called him his "dear pastor [19]" in a subsequent interview. Hagee's rants
against gays [20] and the indisputably antisemitic passages that prompted
John McCain to rescind [21] the preacher's endorsement during his 2008
presidential campaign were of little relevance to Wiesel as he scrambled to
regain his fortune.
Around this time, Wiesel fell in [19] with Shmuley Boteach, a self-styled
celebrity rabbi who functioned as a liaison for Republican mega-donor
Sheldon Adelson. (Adelson began funding Wiesel's foundation in 2007 with a
donation of $1 million). Boteach operated as Wiesel's de facto agent,
arranging high-profile-and likely high-paying-speaking gigs with figures
ranging from Baywatch star Pamela Anderson to Senator Ted Cruz. In return,
the ethically tainted Boteach was able to bask in the presence of a man
regarded with near-universal veneration.
I met Wiesel for a brief moment at New York University's Bronfman Center for
Jewish Life in February 2014. He had just shared a stage [22] with Boteach,
Adelson and Paul Kagame, the Rwandan strongman whose M23 proxy militia
helped fuel the Congolese genocide. During the event, which was as surreal
as it was outrageous, Kagame's security team brutally ejected a lone
audience member who took Wiesel's call to challenge injustice as a cue to
rise from his seat in protest against the Rwandan dictator. Afterward, I
approached Wiesel and asked him about his vehement support for Jewish
settlers [23] ejecting Palestinians from their homes in occupied East
Jerusalem. He told me to contact his office and shuffled away.
That July, Israel embarked on its most lethal operation to date against
residents of the besieged Gaza Strip, destroying or damaging some 100,000
homes and killing over 2,200 people, including 551 children. At the height
of the assault, a shockingly Islamophobic [24] full-page ad appeared in the
New York Times under the banner of Boteach's World Values Network
non-profit, which has received substantial funding from Adelson.
"Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it's Hamas's turn," the
ad declared. Hammering on the common pro-Israel myth that Palestinians do
not value their children's lives as much as Israelis do, the ad denigrated
the besieged residents of Gaza as "worshippers of death cults
indistinguishable from that of the Molochites." The text concluded with the
signature of its author, Elie Wiesel, the man who would be eulogized [25] by
fellow Nobel Prize-winner Barack Obama as "one of the great moral voices of
our time."
With Wiesel's death, the elites who relied on him for moral cover leapt at
the opportunity to claim his legacy. Meanwhile, the teachings and
testimonies of Holocaust survivors who insisted on applying the lessons of
the genocide universally-including to Palestinians-remained confined to the
margins.
Destroying the dissidents
Among the Jewish dissidents to emerge from the nightmare of World War Two
Europe was Marek Edelman, a member of the Warsaw ghetto resistance who
published an open letter [26] to Palestinian resistance fighters during the
Second Intifada, addressing them respectfully as "Palestinian Partisans"
while beseeching them not to attack civilians. There was also Hajo Meyer
[27], who spent months in Auschwitz, where he lost his parents, and spent
his later years writing slashing critiques of the Zionist movement's base
exploitation of the Holocaust. Like Meyer, Hedy Epstein [28] invoked her
experience surviving genocide (she escaped on the kindertransport [29]) to
emphasize the urgency of her activism for Palestinian rights. In her final
years, she embarked on an aid flotilla to the besieged Gaza Strip and
participated in countless demonstrations for human rights, even getting
arrested protesting police brutality in St. Louis, Missouri.
Many Israeli Jews who had fled Europe during the 1930's banded together in
radical organizations like the Socialist Bund [30], Matzpen [31] and the
communist party known as Maki to challenge the military occupation of
Palestinians that began inside Israeli territory in 1949. One of the
earliest leaders of the Israeli Communist Party, Meir Vilner, used his
position in the Knesset (Israel's parliament) to expose the massacre by
Israeli soldiers of 47 innocent Palestinian farmers in 1956 in the town of
Kfar Kassem, where Prime Minister David Ben Gurion had ordered a media
blackout.
"What we wanted to escape in Vilna [Lithuania] we found here [in Israel],"
Vilner said after uncovering the atrocities Israel's military had committed.
"There, hatred was directed against Jews; here against Arabs."
When these dissidents could not be ignored, they have been denigrated [32]
by pro-Israel forces as self-haters, race traitors and even frauds. This
year, when the Austrian parliament invited Hedy Epstein to participate in an
event on women survivors of the Holocaust, she was smeared by Efraim Zuroff,
a self-styled "Nazi hunter" who headed the Simon Wiesenthal Center's
Jerusalem office. "She is not a survivor in the classical sense," Zuroff
claimed, suggesting that Epstein's support for Palestinian rights nullified
her experience of escaping genocide. The Jerusalem Post's Benjamin Weinthal
piled on [33], painting Epstein as a "pro-Hamas, anti-Israel Jew" and
attempting to link her to Iranian Holocaust deniers. As a result of the
pressure, the parliamentary event was canceled. Epstein died three months
later at age 91.
On the day of Wiesel's death, those who took a critical view of his legacy
were subjected to the same wrath as the survivors who challenged the
segregationist principle he represented. Condemning his anti-Palestinian
tirades was painted by right-wing and pro-Israel outlets as tantamount to
Holocaust denial, and invited a torrent of incitement and death threats
transmitted through social media. (A quick browse through my Twitter
interactions will show an almost endless stream of disturbing imprecations).
With Elie Wiesel gone, his most zealous defenders have set out to destroy
those who embraced the message he espoused in his Nobel Prize acceptance
speech [34], but which he ultimately failed to uphold: "Silence encourages
the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human
lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders
and sensitivities become irrelevant."
Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and
the award-winning author of Goliath [35] and Republican Gomorrah [36]. His
most recent book is The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Follow him
on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal [37].
Share on Facebook Share
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [38]
[39]
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/huge-part-elie-wiesels-legacy-being
-whitewashed
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] https://www.facebook.com/hillaryclinton/posts/1179504172106110
[4]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-elie-wiesel_us_57799f20e4b0
416464105bf8
[5]
http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Netanyahu-expresses-condolences-on-Elie-W
iesels-passing-459309
[6]
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/07/03/world-leaders-celebrities-react-to-d
eath-holocaust-survivor-author-elie-wiesel.html
[7] http://www.phschool.com/eteach/language_arts/2002_05/essay.html
[8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IJ4mpCDVpE
[9] http://coreyrobin.com/2015/02/13/i-the-holocaust-am-your-god/
[10]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harut-sassounian/eli-wiesel-is-right-on-ge_b_8
5943.html
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhVmS8jFz2I
[12] http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/11/opinion/oe-wiesel11
[13]
https://www.algemeiner.com/2013/10/03/elie-wiesel-jewish-response-to-syria-g
as-attack-not-powerful-enough-considering-gas-was-used-by-nazis-to-kill-jews
/
[14]
http://www.haaretz.com/elie-wiesel-world-must-intervene-to-stop-gadhafi-1.34
5309
[15]
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/elie-wiesel-ted-cruz-urge-u-s-to-tak
e-iran-seriously-listen-to-netanyahu/
[16] http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jan/18/opinion/oe-shatz18
[17]
http://viewfromthehood.blogspot.com/2009/10/feast-of-tabernacles-san-antonio
-tx.html
[18]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-wilson/netanyahu-ally-john-hagee_b_68482
26.html
[19]
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/meet-shmuley-boteach-right-wing-rea
lity-show-rabbi-hustling-his-way-trump-campaign
[20]
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2008/04/23/22152/hagee-katrina-mccain/
[21]
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/mccain-rejects-hagee-backing-a
s-nazi-remarks-surface/?_r=0
[22] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-SAgejsFrA
[23] http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/strengthening-expelling-palestinians/
[24] http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/wiesel-holocaust-trump/
[25]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/barack-obama-elie-wiesel_us_577957d4e4b0
a629c1aa69fc
[26]
http://www.haaretz.com/news/letter-to-palestinian-partisans-raises-internati
onal-storm-1.37387
[27]
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2014/08/in-memoriam-dr-hajo-meyer.htm
l
[28]
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/5/27/peace_activist_and_holocaust_survivor_
hedy
[29] https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005260
[30] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvmcRKvyrWk
[31] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfcFno2pqJg
[32]
http://forward.com/opinion/israel/204790/moral-emptiness-of-holocaust-surviv
ors-who-took-on/
[33]
http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Austrian-parliament-nixes-event-honoring-pro-H
amas-anti-Israel-Jew-who-fled-Nazis-445613
[34] http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/nobelprizespeech.aspx
[35]
http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345
[36] http://republicangomorrah.com/
[37] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
[38] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on It Is Important to Have
Perspective on Elie Wiesel's Legacy
[39] http://www.alternet.org/
[40] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > It Is Important to Have Perspective on Elie Wiesel's Legacy
It Is Important to Have Perspective on Elie Wiesel's Legacy
By Max Blumenthal [1] / AlterNet [2]
July 5, 2016
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The news of Elie Wiesel's death in the early morning of July 2 ushered in
veneration and reflections from figures across the political spectrum, from
Bill Clinton [3] and Donald Trump [4] to Benjamin Netanyahu [5] and George
W. Bush [6]. The outpouring of high-level praise aimed at consolidating
Wiesel as the eternal voice of the Holocaust and the central preceptor of
its lessons. Those who criticized his legacy or pointed out his moral
contradictions, meanwhile, were ferociously attacked by the forces he helped
inspire.
Back when I was in junior high school, the rabbi of my family's synagogue
urged me to read Wiesel's book Night as part of my Bar Mitzvah preparations.
The story offered a look at the existence of Jews deported to Auschwitz and
Buchenwald that was as harrowing as it was accessible. Reading Night while
studying a Torah portion that chronicled Israelite captivity in ancient
Egypt helped cement the Holocaust as a central component of my Jewish
identity. Countless other Jews my age experienced Wiesel's work in a similar
fashion and many came to idolize him. Like me, few of them knew much about
the man beyond the tribulation he endured in Hitler's death camps.
Though my experience was particular to American Jewish life, the general
public has been familiarized with Wiesel over the course of several
generations through educational curricula [7] and an expansive commercial
apparatus. In 2006, after Oprah Winfrey's embarrassing promotion of James
Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, which turned out to be a
fabrication, her book club made Night its monthly selection. The public
relations maneuver drove the book onto the national bestseller list and
centered its author in the celebrity limelight. Soon after, Oprah joined
Wiesel on a tour of Auschwitz [8], where he spoke before a camera crew in
mystical terms about the souls of those were exterminated and how he
communed with them as he stepped across the hallowed ground.
Through Oprah, Wiesel secured his brand as the high priest of Holocaust
theology, the quasi-religion he introduced some 30 years earlier in a New
York Times op-ed: "The Holocaust [is] the ultimate event," he insisted, "the
ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted. Only those who
were there know what it was; the others will never know."
Reflecting on the impact of Wiesel's work, Brooklyn College political
science professor Corey Robin wrote [9] that he had "turn[ed] the Holocaust
into an industry of middlebrow morality and manipulative sentimentality"
while sacralizing "the ovens [as] our burning bush." For the masses of
Jewish Americans who subscribed to Wiesel's secular theology, he was a
post-war Moses who interceded between the Western world and a catastrophe
that substituted for a merciful God.
While Wiesel leveraged his literary talents to win sympathy for Jewish
victims of genocide, he sought to limit the narratives of other groups
subjected to industrial-level extermination. As a member of the advisory
council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1992, he lobbied against
recognizing LGBTQ and Roma victims of the Holocaust. A decade earlier, when
the Israeli Foreign Ministry demanded Wiesel exclude Armenian scholars from
a conference on genocide, fearing damage to the country's relations with
Turkey, he resigned [10] from his position as chair rather than defend the
scholars. (It was not until 2008 that Wiesel called the massacre of
Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide.)
Wiesel seemed to view these other victimized groups as competitors in an
oppression Olympics, fretting that widespread recognition of the atrocities
they suffered would sap his own moral power. The universalist's credo-"Never
again to anyone [11]"-was a threat to his saintly status, his celebrity and
his bottom line.
Defending Israel, crimes and all
By popularizing an understanding of the Holocaust as a unique event that
existed outside of history, Wiesel helped cast Jews as history's ultimate
victims. In turn, he fueled support for the walled-in Spartan state that was
supposed to represent their deliverance, and defended everything it said it
had to do for their security. "My loyalty to my people, to our people, and
to Israel comes first and prevents me from saying anything critical of
Israel outside Israel," Wiesel wrote.
In the face of increasingly unspeakable crimes against Palestinians, Wiesel
counseled silence. "I must identify with whatever Israel does-even with her
errors," he declared.
Wiesel's unwavering commitment to Israel undoubtedly influenced his vocal
support for President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. "We have a moral
obligation to intervene where evil is in control. Today, that place is
Iraq," he proclaimed in a 2003 op-ed [12]. He went on to demand
American-orchestrated regime change in Syria [13], Libya [14] and Iran. "To
be Jewish in this world is to always be concerned," he told [15] an audience
on Capitol Hill, endorsing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's push
for a U.S. attack on Iran. Wiesel's support for successive assaults on
Middle Eastern countries-always on the grounds of defeating "evil"-made him
a key asset of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists alike.
Since 9/11, Wiesel's figure has helped keep America's imperial designs
safely shrouded in the ghosts of Buchenwald and Babi Yar. As the literary
critic Adam Shatz wrote [16], "the author of Night has gone from being a
great victim of war crimes to being an apologist for those who commit
them-all while invoking his moral authority as a survivor." Even after the
invasions Wiesel advocated for spurred the deaths of some 100,000 Iraqi
civilians and the rise of ISIS, his aura remained intact, keeping him
insulated from accountability.
Embracing hustlers and demonizing Palestinians
When federal authorities busted Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme in 2008,
Wiesel lost the millions he had amassed through his career as writer and
lecturer on the Holocaust. To recoup his losses, he turned to the furthest
shores of the American right-wing, forging mutually beneficial relationships
with a coterie of pro-Israel hate preachers and hustlers.
Just months after losing his investments with Madoff, Wiesel accepted
$500,000 [17] from Pastor John Hagee for a single speech. Addressing Hagee's
congregation in San Antonio, Texas, Wiesel heaped praise on the Christian
Zionist preacher who once described [18] Hitler as a "half-breed Jew," then
called him his "dear pastor [19]" in a subsequent interview. Hagee's rants
against gays [20] and the indisputably antisemitic passages that prompted
John McCain to rescind [21] the preacher's endorsement during his 2008
presidential campaign were of little relevance to Wiesel as he scrambled to
regain his fortune.
Around this time, Wiesel fell in [19] with Shmuley Boteach, a self-styled
celebrity rabbi who functioned as a liaison for Republican mega-donor
Sheldon Adelson. (Adelson began funding Wiesel's foundation in 2007 with a
donation of $1 million). Boteach operated as Wiesel's de facto agent,
arranging high-profile-and likely high-paying-speaking gigs with figures
ranging from Baywatch star Pamela Anderson to Senator Ted Cruz. In return,
the ethically tainted Boteach was able to bask in the presence of a man
regarded with near-universal veneration.
I met Wiesel for a brief moment at New York University's Bronfman Center for
Jewish Life in February 2014. He had just shared a stage [22] with Boteach,
Adelson and Paul Kagame, the Rwandan strongman whose M23 proxy militia
helped fuel the Congolese genocide. During the event, which was as surreal
as it was outrageous, Kagame's security team brutally ejected a lone
audience member who took Wiesel's call to challenge injustice as a cue to
rise from his seat in protest against the Rwandan dictator. Afterward, I
approached Wiesel and asked him about his vehement support for Jewish
settlers [23] ejecting Palestinians from their homes in occupied East
Jerusalem. He told me to contact his office and shuffled away.
That July, Israel embarked on its most lethal operation to date against
residents of the besieged Gaza Strip, destroying or damaging some 100,000
homes and killing over 2,200 people, including 551 children. At the height
of the assault, a shockingly Islamophobic [24] full-page ad appeared in the
New York Times under the banner of Boteach's World Values Network
non-profit, which has received substantial funding from Adelson.
"Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it's Hamas's turn," the
ad declared. Hammering on the common pro-Israel myth that Palestinians do
not value their children's lives as much as Israelis do, the ad denigrated
the besieged residents of Gaza as "worshippers of death cults
indistinguishable from that of the Molochites." The text concluded with the
signature of its author, Elie Wiesel, the man who would be eulogized [25] by
fellow Nobel Prize-winner Barack Obama as "one of the great moral voices of
our time."
With Wiesel's death, the elites who relied on him for moral cover leapt at
the opportunity to claim his legacy. Meanwhile, the teachings and
testimonies of Holocaust survivors who insisted on applying the lessons of
the genocide universally-including to Palestinians-remained confined to the
margins.
Destroying the dissidents
Among the Jewish dissidents to emerge from the nightmare of World War Two
Europe was Marek Edelman, a member of the Warsaw ghetto resistance who
published an open letter [26] to Palestinian resistance fighters during the
Second Intifada, addressing them respectfully as "Palestinian Partisans"
while beseeching them not to attack civilians. There was also Hajo Meyer
[27], who spent months in Auschwitz, where he lost his parents, and spent
his later years writing slashing critiques of the Zionist movement's base
exploitation of the Holocaust. Like Meyer, Hedy Epstein [28] invoked her
experience surviving genocide (she escaped on the kindertransport [29]) to
emphasize the urgency of her activism for Palestinian rights. In her final
years, she embarked on an aid flotilla to the besieged Gaza Strip and
participated in countless demonstrations for human rights, even getting
arrested protesting police brutality in St. Louis, Missouri.
Many Israeli Jews who had fled Europe during the 1930's banded together in
radical organizations like the Socialist Bund [30], Matzpen [31] and the
communist party known as Maki to challenge the military occupation of
Palestinians that began inside Israeli territory in 1949. One of the
earliest leaders of the Israeli Communist Party, Meir Vilner, used his
position in the Knesset (Israel's parliament) to expose the massacre by
Israeli soldiers of 47 innocent Palestinian farmers in 1956 in the town of
Kfar Kassem, where Prime Minister David Ben Gurion had ordered a media
blackout.
"What we wanted to escape in Vilna [Lithuania] we found here [in Israel],"
Vilner said after uncovering the atrocities Israel's military had committed.
"There, hatred was directed against Jews; here against Arabs."
When these dissidents could not be ignored, they have been denigrated [32]
by pro-Israel forces as self-haters, race traitors and even frauds. This
year, when the Austrian parliament invited Hedy Epstein to participate in an
event on women survivors of the Holocaust, she was smeared by Efraim Zuroff,
a self-styled "Nazi hunter" who headed the Simon Wiesenthal Center's
Jerusalem office. "She is not a survivor in the classical sense," Zuroff
claimed, suggesting that Epstein's support for Palestinian rights nullified
her experience of escaping genocide. The Jerusalem Post's Benjamin Weinthal
piled on [33], painting Epstein as a "pro-Hamas, anti-Israel Jew" and
attempting to link her to Iranian Holocaust deniers. As a result of the
pressure, the parliamentary event was canceled. Epstein died three months
later at age 91.
On the day of Wiesel's death, those who took a critical view of his legacy
were subjected to the same wrath as the survivors who challenged the
segregationist principle he represented. Condemning his anti-Palestinian
tirades was painted by right-wing and pro-Israel outlets as tantamount to
Holocaust denial, and invited a torrent of incitement and death threats
transmitted through social media. (A quick browse through my Twitter
interactions will show an almost endless stream of disturbing imprecations).
With Elie Wiesel gone, his most zealous defenders have set out to destroy
those who embraced the message he espoused in his Nobel Prize acceptance
speech [34], but which he ultimately failed to uphold: "Silence encourages
the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human
lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders
and sensitivities become irrelevant."
Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and
the award-winning author of Goliath [35] and Republican Gomorrah [36]. His
most recent book is The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Follow him
on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal [37].
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [38]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[39]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/huge-part-elie-wiesels-legacy-being
-whitewashed
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] https://www.facebook.com/hillaryclinton/posts/1179504172106110
[4]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-elie-wiesel_us_57799f20e4b0
416464105bf8
[5]
http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Netanyahu-expresses-condolences-on-Elie-W
iesels-passing-459309
[6]
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/07/03/world-leaders-celebrities-react-to-d
eath-holocaust-survivor-author-elie-wiesel.html
[7] http://www.phschool.com/eteach/language_arts/2002_05/essay.html
[8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IJ4mpCDVpE
[9] http://coreyrobin.com/2015/02/13/i-the-holocaust-am-your-god/
[10]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harut-sassounian/eli-wiesel-is-right-on-ge_b_8
5943.html
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhVmS8jFz2I
[12] http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/11/opinion/oe-wiesel11
[13]
https://www.algemeiner.com/2013/10/03/elie-wiesel-jewish-response-to-syria-g
as-attack-not-powerful-enough-considering-gas-was-used-by-nazis-to-kill-jews
/
[14]
http://www.haaretz.com/elie-wiesel-world-must-intervene-to-stop-gadhafi-1.34
5309
[15]
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/elie-wiesel-ted-cruz-urge-u-s-to-tak
e-iran-seriously-listen-to-netanyahu/
[16] http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jan/18/opinion/oe-shatz18
[17]
http://viewfromthehood.blogspot.com/2009/10/feast-of-tabernacles-san-antonio
-tx.html
[18]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-wilson/netanyahu-ally-john-hagee_b_68482
26.html
[19]
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/meet-shmuley-boteach-right-wing-rea
lity-show-rabbi-hustling-his-way-trump-campaign
[20]
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2008/04/23/22152/hagee-katrina-mccain/
[21]
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/mccain-rejects-hagee-backing-a
s-nazi-remarks-surface/?_r=0
[22] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-SAgejsFrA
[23] http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/strengthening-expelling-palestinians/
[24] http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/wiesel-holocaust-trump/
[25]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/barack-obama-elie-wiesel_us_577957d4e4b0
a629c1aa69fc
[26]
http://www.haaretz.com/news/letter-to-palestinian-partisans-raises-internati
onal-storm-1.37387
[27]
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2014/08/in-memoriam-dr-hajo-meyer.htm
l
[28]
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/5/27/peace_activist_and_holocaust_survivor_
hedy
[29] https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005260
[30] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvmcRKvyrWk
[31] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfcFno2pqJg
[32]
http://forward.com/opinion/israel/204790/moral-emptiness-of-holocaust-surviv
ors-who-took-on/
[33]
http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Austrian-parliament-nixes-event-honoring-pro-H
amas-anti-Israel-Jew-who-fled-Nazis-445613
[34] http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/nobelprizespeech.aspx
[35]
http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345
[36] http://republicangomorrah.com/
[37] http://twitter.com/maxblumenthal
[38] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on It Is Important to Have
Perspective on Elie Wiesel's Legacy
[39] http://www.alternet.org/
[40] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
