Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel died on Saturday at the age of 87. He was a living witness to the horrors of antisemitism taken to its logical conclusion, and a powerful spokesman for the cause of Zionism and the ideals of America.
Which is precisely why terror sympathizers and antisemites like Max Blumenthal — son of Hillary Clinton’s close associate, Sid Blumenthal, and a Jew who hates both Israel and the Jewish people into which he was born — celebrated Wiesel’s death.
Elie Wiesel is dead. He spent his last years inciting hatred, defending apartheid & palling around with fascists. pic.twitter.com/3bRTq4QDye
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 2, 2016
The elder Blumenthal, who earns $200,000 per year as a part of Clinton’s inner circle, frequently sent the Secretary of State his son’s hateful “work.” That oeuvre includes Goliath, an anti-Israel screed casting the Jewish state in the role of the Nazis.
Blumenthal’s bile is a perfect tribute to Wiesel, who was the living retort to such nonsense. He earned his enemies by being a witness who not only refused to die, but also to shut up.
It was Wiesel who elevated the phrase “speaking truth to power,” as he took on presidents from both parties, challenging Ronald Reagan’s visit to Bitburg and Barack Obama’s surrender to Iran.
His most widely-read work, Night, is a riveting memoir of his survival at Auschwitz, after the Jews in his remote Hungarian village were rounded up, stuffed into cattle cars, and sent to die horrific deaths. (I first read Night in the eighth grade; its terror has stayed with me since.)
But Wiesel won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for peace, not for literature. It was Wiesel who shaped memory into a potent political force: whenever a new genocide loomed, he was the voice of conscience, urging the world to act.
In his efforts to save others, he drew no distinctions of race, religion, or ethnicity. He was as passionate in his pleas for Muslims in danger of extermination as he was in defending the State of Israel’s right to defend its citizens against Palestinian terrorism.
Re-read Max Blumenthal’s tweet — accusing Wiesel of “defending apartheid” — and then read what Wiesel said on accepting the Nobel Prize:
It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own: Israel, Soviet Jewry, Jews in Arab lands … But there are others as important to me. Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism.
In that same speech, he recognized the “plight” of the Palestinians, but added that he “deplore[d]” their terrorist methods. “Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land,” he said.
That is a solution Max Blumenthal, and his Clinton-advising father, reject.
Notably, Hillary Clinton has not shunned the Blumenthals. These are the sorts of people whom even Barack Obama, with his long history of associations with Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Khalidi and the like, knew to keep at bay.
With the passing of Wiesel and his generation, fabulists like Max Blumenthal — who invert history to cast Israel as the “fascists” — will feel emboldened.
That is precisely why each of us must keep Wiesel’s work, and his moral vision, alive.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, will be published by Regnery on July 25 and is available for pre-order through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.