Skip to main content

Elie Wiesel image well and truly tarnished

Elie Wiesel is always put forward as a fair-minded libertarian and champion of decency, liberty and tolerance.

Well, that might have been at one time - even though people have questioned him in some situations in which he has placed himself - but his latest support of a venture in Jerusalem borders on the graceful. 

"One of the leading land-grabbers in East Jerusalem is an Israeli settler NGO, Elad, one of whose tactics has been to have Palestinian homes declared archaeological sites. This allows them to condemn and expel the residents and then create artificial archaeology parks.  Elad celebrated one of its major projects, opening a hitherto “secret tunnel” from the City of David (one of its archaeological sites) to the Western Wall (Kotel) at such a Selichot ceremony.

Elad’s goal is to rid Jerusalem, especially those parts of it with Jewish historical significance (which most often happen to be within Palestinian neighborhoods), of Arabs.  It will do so by hook or by crook.  Since Palestinians don’t generally take well to their homes being taken out from under them–it’s usually by crook.  Elad is part of the settler movement that seeks, either intentionally or unintentionally to create a religious conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.  For Elad, this is a Jewish jihad, literally a Jewish struggle for dominance of the Holy City.

Who should join these settlers in commemorating their service on behalf of the Jewish people and their expropriation of Palestinian land?  None other than Nobel Peace Prize winner and Jewish humanitarian par excellence, Elie Wiesel.  In fact, he’s the chair of this settler group’s Advisory Board.  He was joined by two former Israeli intelligence chiefs, Shabtai Shavit and Amos Yadlin, a number of prominent judges, lawyers, entertainers and government officials.   It doesn’t seem that the introspective spirit of Selichot in which we contemplate our sins and ways we and our people have fallen short, penetrated Wiesel’s brain.  None of this should surprise us since Wiesel has already taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from John Hagee and spoken to one of his CUFI, Christian Zionist pro-Israel celebrations.  The money I’m sure went to replenish some of the millions Bernie Madoff pilfered from him.  Wiesel has also joined together with Alan Dershowitz in sponsoring a Jewish anti-Iran group.   He called the Goldstone Report a “crime against the Jewish people.”   How the (once) mighty have fallen."
 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more